Searching for Mr Holmes
by Captain Evermind
Summary: Six months, Mycroft had said, and Mycroft was never wrong. But it's been closer to sixteen and John's heard nothing. Not a whisper, not a word. So when a coded message arrives warning of danger, Sherlock's friends are thrust into the midst of a cloak-and-dagger underworld in a desperate effort to solve a decade-old mystery and bring their detective home. SH, JW, GL, MH(x2), MM, IA.
1. Chapter 1

**A note on time:** This story is set in the aftermath of Season Three, assuming that Moriarty never made his oh-so-convenient last minute appearance and that Sherlock's exile was never repealed. The characters are probably a little younger than others might write them, but I'm working on the premise that Sherlock and John first met when they were in their mid- to late- twenties and that seven years have passed since then.

 **A note on pairings:** This story involves a number of grown-up relationships between consenting adults. There won't be anything explicit, but please consider yourselves warned. Also, relationships between characters are likely to evolve and change over the course of the story (amazing, I know). As such, I won't be telling you who ends up with whom. If you really _have_ to know before you'll consider reading it, please send me a PM or ask me in a review. Cheers, and thanks for reading. -Ev.

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* * *

Chapter One. 

_._

It was six pm on a Friday night, and John was sitting alone on the couch watching telly.

Well, perhaps not entirely alone. His daughter was there too – but he wasn't certain whether the company of a fourteen-month child who was chewing a wooden dog and drooling on the carpet entirely counted. Not that he didn't enjoy his daughter's company – far from it. In point of fact, John suspected that he was more besotted than was quite socially acceptable, even given the gentle leeway usually granted to first-time fathers. He had begun to get an inkling of this the last time he visited Baker Street, when even Mrs Hudson had started to seem bored with baby photos after the first fifteen minutes.

Mary was out for the evening. There wasn't anything sinister in that. It didn't signify that they were no longer on speaking terms or that their marriage was crumbling beneath the smothering weight of domesticity. They'd just made the decision very early on to give each other one night off, alone, per week – a piece of merciful, much-needed sanity in the rising tide of _nappies-feedings-pureed banana-bottles-teddies-stretch 'n' grow suits_ that their lives had become. Mary spent her evenings off at book groups, at yoga, out for dinner or dancing or drinks with the girls. They were nights when John lay awake, listening to his daughter snuffling across the hall, and Mary came home at eleven pm, twelve, one, two… She'd slip in quietly, smelling of sweat and smoke, other people's bodies, and _Claire de la Lune._ She was better at this than John was. Better at this life, better at passing. But he'd known that, or suspected it, since the day he found a bottle of her perfume resting on the table beside his chair.

John's evenings off invariably followed the same pattern: he took Thursdays every week and played rugby with the social team that he and Greg had cobbled together a few years ago out of coppers and doctors and the odd ex-con. Greg played lock, solid and understated as he was in everything. Angelo was a chaotic, demanding centre. John played first-five – a flash of pride and exhibitionism that he'd thought forgotten. After the game, there was always gentle ribaldry and loud laughter in a changing room that smelled of grass and liniment. John treated sprains and minor injuries (they were none of them as young as they used to be), and there were pints from the tap and packets of salt and vinegar crisps in the clubrooms afterwards. Two pints, no more, and he was usually home for Billie's bed-time at 7.30.

He'd told Mary, after it all, that he wanted to name their daughter Billie. She hadn't thought much of it, at first, but she'd come around. She liked that it was cheeky and androgynous, a little different. Aunt Harry had approved, for much the same reasons.

John hadn't told them why he wanted the name. He regretted it now, in any case. It felt silly, and he was ashamed of it. It didn't feel like a homage and it never had – not when the man she was named for had never laid eyes on her. Not when he was in exile somewhere in Serbia or the Ukraine, or bloody Tanzania, the fuck John knew.

He'd never been able to think of Sherlock as William anyway.

But 'Billie' his daughter was christened, and Billie she would remain. Billie Grace Watson. He thought that 'Grace' may have been a homage of Mary's own – a reference to a time before; to the second of four innocuous-seeming letters scrawled in black sharpie. He hadn't asked, and Mary hadn't told him. So instead, he called his daughter 'Bilbo'. It annoyed Mary, just a little, but not enough to remove the trace of amusement from her eyes.

Billie tossed her saliva-smeared wooden dog across the carpet and it bounced once, hit the couch, and fell back to smack him on the ankle.

"Come here then," he said.

He held down his arms, and Billie totter-tumbled into them.

"Dah," she said, smacking the dog against his knee. He wasn't sure whether that was meant to be 'Dad' or 'dog'.

Once, he had thought about introducing his daughter to Sherlock. Had fantasised, really, in his quiet moments, at work or on the tube. He'd imagined trying to teach her to say his friend's name, or the lectures he'd give Sherlock regarding bio-waste and chemicals and age-appropriate playthings.

He'd never had the chance.

Six months, Mycroft had said; and Mycroft was never wrong. But it had been closer to sixteen, and John had heard nothing. Not a whisper, not a word.

He settled his daughter in his lap and turned his attention back to the television. John knew that this was the worst of clichés – a retired veteran at home on the couch on a Friday evening, watching _M*A*S*H._ It was a show that old men watched – men who served in WWII; in Korea; in Vietnam. And now John.

That wasn't why he watched it though. The show didn't remind him of the war. Or at least, not of Afghanistan.

On the screen, Hawkeye had passed out at last into a drugged oblivion after five increasingly-manic days without sleep and an insomniac haze that had him trying to ship the Officers' latrine to North Korea.

 _"McIntyre, why does he_ _do_ _these things?"_ Henry Blake asked plaintively, in a voice that reminded John of Greg Lestrade.

Onscreen, Trapper John McIntyre shrugged, rolling the stem of his glass between his fingers. _"He's just unstable."_

Secretly, John had begun to despise Trapper. There was no rhyme nor reason to it. He was an intelligent character, witty and worldly: a doctor, a surgeon, a captain. Yet he was content to follow at Hawkeye's elbow, to act as foil and comic stooge, to play the sidekick to his more eloquent, more mercurial, more passionate friend. John hated him.

The episode finished, and the theme music started up, soothing and familiar. Billie's bed-time, or near enough. John slung his daughter over one shoulder and carried her to her cot. She was burbling cheerfully at him, but she went down with barely a whimper. He stroked a hand through the baby-fine curls and was rewarded with a dazzling sunny smile.

The next episode was already playing by the time he re-entered the lounge. On-screen, Hawkeye was ranting, superbly arrogant, all fierceness and motion ( _"You don't understand. I_ _need_ _those ribs!"_ ). John stifled a bitter smile. He knew that he would watch the episode through to the end. And the next, and probably the next as well. He'd watch the slight, dark-haired madman as though, if he watched long enough, he could absorb the flash of his eyes, the quicksilver mind, the rapid-fire beating of his heart. Not a genius, of course, but close – so close, sometimes, that John could almost taste the adrenaline upon his tongue. God help him, he was practically in love with a fictional character. There really was no hope for him.

He wondered what Ella might make of that one.

It had been sixteen months, and still, John missed him. It wasn't as though he saw Sherlock in his dreams or woke every morning calling out his name; he didn't see tall figures in dark coats on every street corner, and only once had he made the mistake of handing his wife a cup of coffee that was black with two sugars in it. He hadn't resorted to stealing Sherlock's dressing gown, or to standing his unlikely silver cigarette case like a touch-stone on his desk at work. It wasn't like that time at all. Then, John had been devastated; now, he was just _missing_. He thought of Sherlock at the strangest times. When bored and waiting on a patient he'd flip his phone over and over in his hand, wishing for a text that he knew would not come. When doing the laundry he'd wonder, half-distracted, where all of Sherlock's pants had got to.

John looked at the television, scarcely seeing it. He wasn't interested in the plot – he'd seen it before. He was only watching it for Hawkeye – for the weak, vicarious thrill to be found in that larger-than-life character – the sort of man who'd steal an artery from a corpse or walk naked through a tent full of people to stave off boredom.

Mercifully, perhaps, John's musing was interrupted by the arrival of a visitor. Three knocks, very genteel. Even as he switched off the television and clambered to his feet, John knew who it would be. Harry would have rung the bell; Greg would still be pounding the door; Molly or Mrs Hudson would have called first.

The figure on the stoop was a tall, wavering silhouette against the frosted-glass pane of the door as John reached for the latch.

"Hello Mycroft."

There was an expression of polite surprise upon Mycroft's face. It was affected, John could tell. He doubted whether anything he did would really surprise Mycroft Holmes.

"Good evening, John. Your powers of observation are improving, I see."

"It wasn't that difficult."

Mycroft's smile was small and urbane. "You are well, I trust?"

He stepped inside at John's invitation. He hung his coat on the coat rack and put his umbrella in the umbrella stand. Mycroft was the only person John knew who ever used the umbrella stand.

"Well enough. You want tea?"

Mycroft followed at a polite distance as John led the way down the hall. He flicked on the kettle, and chucked the old leaves from the teapot into the sink. Mycroft took tea the same way John did, the same way Sherlock had. Milk-and-no-sugar, like Englishmen. Mary preferred hers black, with mint or honey or lemon. It was almost the only tell she had.

"I presume you've got news?" John asked, once they were seated. Mycroft smiled again, neat and precise, an implied compliment to John's deductive skills that John found rather grating.

"I received a communication from Sherlock yesterday," Mycroft confirmed. He reached into the inner breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a postcard, which he slid across the table to John. "I thought you might like to see it."

John's first thought, curiously, was disappointment. It was a small postcard; smaller than standard. The picture was nothing more exciting than a nondescript hillside, autumnal trees in shades of sepia and faded gold. Then he turned it over, and his heart flipped painfully at the sight of Sherlock's unmistakeable scrawl. There was a moment of puzzled, heart-plunging disappointment before his senses caught up with him.

"I presume this is code?"

"Indeed." Mycroft looked pleased and proprietary, as if John were a particularly feeble-minded student finally grasping a simple fact. John scowled.

As far as he could make out, the card was meaningless. It was a cypher for which he didn't have the key, and the thought stung more than perhaps it should.

 _In Copenhagen. I have climbed the stairs to the top of a nearby hill in order to write this. When first I came here, the leaves were falling and the mornings were misty and beautiful. It reminded me of the illustrations of Camelot in a book I owned as a child. Flying out to Puerto Rico tomorrow. I love you._

There was no signature. The last three words looked strange and unnatural in Sherlock's handwriting.

"Ok, so all that I get from this is that he's definitely _not_ in Copenhagen," John said. "Care to translate?"

Mycroft chuckled. "You are correct, of course. The code is one that we invented as children. It relies on key-words or associations. Very simplistic, but it has proven useful because the associations are specific to us – they are illogical in the extreme and contain no point of reference for an outside party, which makes them surprisingly difficult to unravel."

When John only looked confused, he elaborated. "If Sherlock were to send you a message stating that he had found a lovely cameo brooch in Vatican City, you would understand it to be a warning of danger, yes?"

John nodded.

"Well, this code is similar. Copenhagen, to me, implies Amsterdam because as a small child Sherlock once made the error of asserting that Hans Christian Anderson was Dutch. It is thus a simple substitution of one capital city for the other, though one which would be incomprehensible to anyone who had not shared our childhood. Do you follow?"

John nodded slowly. "Yeah, ok, I get it. But it's not a direct translation, right? I mean, you haven't agreed on code-words beforehand. You're just guessing based on what you think he was thinking when he wrote it."

"Yes."

"So how do you know he was thinking about Hans Christian Anderson? What if he was thinking of, I dunno, a type of shoes they only make in Denmark or something?"

Mycroft looked amused. "You forget, I know my brother well, and I know the way his mind works. I am very much afraid that I teased him horribly at the time. He won't have forgotten it."

A slow grin made its way across John's face. "It's a joke, isn't it? You and Sherlock have private jokes."

Mycroft huffed. "Nothing so commonplace, I assure you."

John's grin only widened. "Ok, sure. Whatever you say. So the bit about climbing the hill then?"

"He has finished what he came there to do," Mycroft translated.

"So he can come home?" John winced internally at the eagerness in his own voice. _Get a grip, Watson._

"He _could_." Mycroft said, softly. John's excitement dipped a couple of notches.

"But?"

" _But_ he appears disinclined to do so," Mycroft said, with a sigh. He gestured to the postcard. "The reference to falling leaves means that he has been hearing rumours; the mist indicates that the source may be untrustworthy. Camelot is a reference to a particular British agent, so it is reasonable to presume that the rumours concern him, and that Sherlock intends to investigate. Puerto Rico is Cuba." He paused, and the corner of his moth twitched momentarily. "That one was from a game of Risk."

John grinned. A heady sense of relief was filling him. Sherlock was alive. Not coming home yet, not coming back to John, but alive and on a chase nonetheless. And John would have the pleasure, when he finally came back, or smacking him for being such a bloody great berk.

"And the last bit?" he asked, grinning. "The 'I love you'? I'm guessing that doesn't exactly mean what it says it means." His mouth twitched. The thought of Sherlock proclaiming his brotherly love was the mental equivalent of a Hell, not just frozen over, but colonised by waddling pink puffins in fluffy hats.

Mycroft did not appear to share John's amusement. His expression was grim, and the eyes with which he fixed John were grey and cold.

"No." He spoke carefully, his enunciation precise. "It means that he is about to die."

.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two.

.

John was silent, staring at the unfamiliar words in that so-familiar handwriting. _I love you._

 _I + love + you = I am going to die._

The letters of the postmark had blurred slightly, John noticed. The woman depicted on the stamp had a smudge of gentian-violet about her mouth and across the blade of her cheek. The face on the stamp was a profile; John didn't know whose.

Mycroft lifted his cup, and sighed. He sipped slowly at his tea, as if contemplating what to say. "You can understand the logic, of course. Words which we would refuse to speak to one another except upon pain of death; the perfect signal, really."

John said nothing. He did not find Mycroft's sense of irony at all comforting.

"I will be honest with you, John. I never expected Sherlock to complete this work without my assistance, let alone to survive it. That he has done both makes me more proud than I can say."

John stared up at him, his tea sitting cold in his stomach. "You knew he was going to die. You knew, and you let him get on that plane."

"I thought it… likely. I would have prevented it if I could, of course. But neither of us were under any illusions when he left England."

 _(Six months, Mycroft estimates. He's never wrong.)_

"No," said John harshly. "I suppose you left those for me."

There was a hard, still silence.

John turned the postcard over in his hands. The cardboard was cheap, starting to soften about the corners. It was clearly old; there was a diagonal line of fading from where it had been displayed in the sun. The postmark was indeed from Copenhagen, dated four days ago. He wondered how Sherlock had managed that.

At last, Mycroft broke the silence. "We had few choices left to us in the wake of the Magnusson affair," he continued, as if there had been no interruption, no digression into that old familiar territory: _your best friend would die_ (has died) _for you._

"Again, I must reiterate that Sherlock has proven himself more capable than even I expected. Without my intervention, we fully anticipated that his assignment would prove fatal before six months were past. Even with my intervention, we estimated his chances of survival to be no greater than 35%. By the time the project had reached its eighth month and his death had still failed to eventuate we were in uncharted waters. We had almost no communication and even less ability to predict how further events might play out. By the ten month mark I was bringing considerable pressure to bear politically in order to have him brought in. Regrettably, it transpires that I have an enemy, or enemies, who have selected this particular project as their winning ticket. I have no legal recourse left to me, and few illegal ones. My hands, as they say, are tied."

John released a slow breath through his nose. His heart was beating very loud in his own ears.

"That can't be it." He said. "You wouldn't have told me if that was all there was. You're not going to let this happen."

Mycroft smiled thinly. "You weren't listening," he said. "I said that I had no _legal_ recourse left to me. I do not intend to be the last and least of the Holmes brothers, John."

"So what are you going to do?"

"I am going to, as I believe the saying is, _go rogue._ "

John didn't quite choke on his tea, but it was a near thing. "You what?"

"You heard me. I intend to bring Sherlock home. And I intend to enlist your services in order to do so."

There was a glint of steel in Mycroft's glance that reminded John that this was, after all, Sherlock's brother. It was easy to become complacent with Mycroft – so well did he convey the persona of a well-fed and self-satisfied gentleman Tory. It took moments like this to remind John of the sleek menace behind the façade.

"Why me?" he asked. "Why not Anthea, or some of your lot?"

Mycroft's mouth twitched at the name 'Anthea', as if he found it amusing.

"Because the exercise of my legal powers is currently hobbled by politicking. There are individuals in my organisation who have a strongly vested interest in ensuring that Sherlock never makes it home. If I approach this through my usual channels, I will find myself countered at every turn. The only means open to me, therefore, is to slip beneath their radar. That means no state resources, no funds, and strictly _no_ personnel. At least four of my own staff are compromised, and there may be others of whom I am unaware." Mycroft raised one eyebrow, and fixed John with his most urbane look. "Which leaves me with you."

John let out a huff of breath. "A road trip with Mycroft Holmes. God help me."

Mycroft actually laughed. It was polite and decidedly un-humorous, but it was a laugh nevertheless.

"It may not be quite so painful as you imagine. There are several others I wish to recruit – notably, if she will consent to come, your lady wife."

"Now hang on," John objected. "Mary can't just drop everything and come chasing off to Cuba. We've got a baby."

"That's not going to prevent you from coming though, is it?" Mycroft asked, brows raised. "Arrangements for Miss Watson can be made. Your wife would be a considerable asset to our cause. She is, after all, an excellent shot."

John's mouth thinned. "She's not that person anymore."

"Is she not?" Mycroft asked, with an amused smirk that set John's teeth on edge. "Well, we shall have to see."

For a few moments, John met Mycroft's eyes challengingly. Mycroft's expression did not waver. Then he smiled, and reached again for his teacup. For awhile, there was silence.

.

"What did you mean before?" John said, at last. "That bit about being 'the last and least of the Holmes brothers'?"

There was a momentary hesitation in Mycroft's response, a slight chink as he laid his cup back on its saucer. "You are aware, I think, that we had an elder brother?"

John nodded. He _did_ know, but only because he'd seen the photos at their parents' place. Two Christmases ago, before everything went to hell. Photos of three slight, dark-haired boys, incongruous and homely when set beside the siblings John knew. Several had been school photographs – gap-toothed and beaming in over-bright home-knitted jumpers, arrayed in artificial fraternity with their hands on one another's shoulders in front of awful pastel-blue 80s backdrops.

Mycroft steepled his hands together in front of his mouth, touching his forefingers to his lips. The gesture sent a pang through John's abdomen.

"Sherrinford was talented," Mycroft said. "Exceptionally so. He had an ability to read a situation and manipulate it accordingly that I have rarely seen equaled. He could pick up any weapon and use it; any instrument and play it; any gadget and understand it. A language that might take Sherlock or me six hours to learn, Sherrinford would master in two. And yet, for all this, it has always been Sherlock who burned the brightest."

He paused, as if trying to marshal and explain some concept beyond John's understanding.

"Sherrinford was talented," he said, with a light shrug. "I am clever. But Sherlock – Sherlock is extraordinary."

"He says you're smarter than him," John said awkwardly. Mycroft tipped his head in acknowledgement.

"And so I am," he said. "But it is cleverness only. I have knowledge and strategy and inductive reasoning, but I lack Sherlock's brilliance; the leaps of logic; the flashes of intuition of which he is capable. Sherlock is a genius, John. At his best, he reaches heights of which neither Sherrinford nor I have ever been capable."

Privately, John felt that Mycroft was being over-modest in his assessment, but he didn't say anything.

"I have already lost one brother for the sake of England," Mycroft said at last. "I find a second to be a sacrifice that I am not willing to make."

* * *

After Mycroft had left, John opened a bottle of wine. It was a red: heavy, astringent and hangover-inducing, and not the sort of thing he liked. The first glass went down hard, but the second was easier. The third only made him feel ill.

He was lying in bed with his eyes open and the postcard still in his hand when he heard the jingle of Mary's keys in the front door. He heard her stealthy footsteps in the hall and the sound of her easing open the door to Billie's room.

John lay in the dark while Mary checked on the baby. He wasn't thinking, not really. He didn't know what to think about.

He didn't know how long it was before Mary left Billie's room and crossed the hall to their own. She was momentarily silhouetted in the doorway before she slipped inside. She placed her handbag in its usual spot beside the dresser and discarded her coat over the back of the chair. It was only as she turned back towards the bed that she seemed to realise John was awake.

"Hello," she said, surprised. "You're up late."

She walked over to kiss his temple, perching on the edge of the bed beside him. The makeup around her eyes was smudged to a smoky grey.

"Mycroft came over," John said, by way of explanation, though it didn't explain things – not really.

.

"Did you know that they had a brother?" John asked.

Grey light was beginning to filter through the curtains. John was lying on his back, not touching her, his face turned towards the ceiling. In the dim light, she could not tell what he was looking at.

"I did hear a rumour," Mary admitted. John lay very still. For a few moments, she thought that he would leave it be.

"Did you ever hear anything about them… before?"

Mary tensed. They didn't talk about it often. Usually, John tried to believe the lie. But he couldn't keep himself from worrying at it, working around the fraying edges of the fiction as though it were a ghost that he could not quite lay to rest. She supposed that after all those years with Sherlock worrying at mysteries was as much a habit as anything.

"A little," she told him warily. "I knew of Mycroft by reputation. Everybody knew about him. I never knew his real name though. It took me an embarrassingly long time after I got over here to realise who he was." She snorted. "If I'd known he was Sherlock's brother, I never would have dared to ask you out."

"Holmeses. Ruining my love life since 1863."

Mary's mouth twitched. "Quite."

"Did you ever hear anything about their brother?" John asked quietly. "Apparently he died 'for the sake of England', whatever that means."

Mary laughed harshly. "Well, that's one way of putting it."

"What do you mean?"

The frown was apparent in John's voice, and it gave her pause. Gently, she rolled sideways until she was facing him, her fingers skimming the line of his forearm.

"Sherlock never told you?"

John huffed a little. "Sherlock doesn't tell me stuff." His hand gestured vaguely in something approximating irritation. Mary sighed.

"Mycroft killed him, John. Or at least ordered him killed; I don't know if he actually pulled the trigger himself. I said Mycroft had a reputation. That's how he got it."

"What?" John's voice was incredulous, almost amused, like a parent who suspects a child of telling stories.

"It only came out afterwards, obviously. Mycroft was head of the whole Russian field: intelligence smuggling, sabotage, running agents out of every border state, and somehow managing to pull off the entire thing from deep cover right inside the Russian centre. His brother was a field agent who got caught. The story goes, Mycroft sold him out rather than break his own cover."

John turned his head to look at her for the first time. His eyes searched hers and it came to her, painfully, that he did not trust her. His brow was crumpled, a frown etched deep between his eyes.

"It could have been a mistake," he said.

Mary felt a strange rush of pity for her husband, for the good, sweet man who lay beside her.

"It could have been a mistake," he repeated, stubbornly. "They could have been trying to fake it. Maybe they tried to escape or something and it went wrong."

Mary met his eyes, wanting to kiss him, wanting to smooth away the troubled frown from between his brows. Her hand faltered against his arm, thumb skimming lightly over the inside of his wrist.

"It was hardly a mistake," she said softly. "Mycroft gave the execution order."

.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Haha. And just when I had you all convinced that Mycroft was a nice guy! My grateful thanks to everybody who's reviewed so far. Stay tuned!


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three.

 _._

John kicked off his work shoes with a sigh of relief, revealing mismatched socks. The one on his left foot was a sports sock, white-and-red, and so old that it was almost worn through. The one on his right was a business sock, charcoal grey and too big for him, so that it bunched uncomfortably around the heel. Nearly two years since his marriage and he was still wearing Sherlock's socks.

There was music on in the kitchen, Mary half-dancing as she sashayed around clattering pans and roasting dishes in 4/4 time. John sighed.

Popular music was his own personal hell. Almost every song he heard had some line that made him think of Sherlock – so much so that he had taken to cataloguing them. The first time he noticed it, he'd tried an experiment: how many songs did it take before he found one that contained no reference, no reminder of his former life?

The first song had been Elton John's 'Daniel'.

 _'Daniel is leaving tonight on a plane... I can see the red tail-lights heading for Spain…'_

No.

After that, he kept a careful record. It was just an exercise. Just a game he played with himself. And yes, he _knew_ that they were all fucking love songs, and didn't that just piss him right off?

 _'I'm… so much like you… restless and reckless… I need a clue.'_

No.

 _'My mind it kinda goes fast… I try to slow it down for you…'_

No.

 _'I heard that you'd settled down; that you found a girl and you're married now…'_

Great. Now even the fucking radio was guilt-tripping him.

When he'd arrived home that first day, Mary had been playing Beatles tracks and he'd thought he might have a chance; but it soon became abundantly apparent that he'd misjudged terribly. 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' was bloody _made_ for Sherlock Holmes (even as he'd fed his daughter tinned peaches, he could picture the maniac bouncing around the room, clapping his hands together in glee). 'Rocky Raccoon' was not much better. He'd thought that he might be onto a winner with 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' until he'd heard the words 'newspaper', 'taxis' and 'marmalade' in quick succession, and no, dammit, that was just bloody _pathetic._

On that first day he'd been forced, in the end, to switch to some bloody kids' station, and he'd never in his life been so pleased to hear 'Single Ladies' (Hah. Try working your way into _that_ one, William Sherlock Scott Holmes).

He'd taken to keeping track, day by day – at the surgery; out shopping; on the tube. Eighteen songs till he heard one that didn't remind him of Sherlock (thank you very much, Ms. Beyoncé). Thirty-three songs…. Twelve… Twenty-four… In his worst week it had reached a staggering, ludicrous, impossible eighty-one and he'd been forced to switch stations until he was listening to a serious-sounding Arabic bloke droning the Qur'an, but by then he'd had eighty-one songs-worth of missing Sherlock Holmes and it was bloody well worth it.

The postcard from Sherlock was in John's pocket. He'd folded it in half and slipped it into his jeans when he'd dressed that morning. In the time that he'd had it, the fold had softened and the corners had already begun to fray with handling.

He retrieved it now, collapsing back against the head-rest of the couch and contemplating the ridiculous scribble that passed for Sherlock's handwriting.

Mary emerged from the kitchen, humming along to 'Sex on Fire' (' _All the commotion… the kiddie-like play… Has people talking…'_ Nope, that one was out too). She had glasses with ice and lemon in one hand and their daughter on her hip.

"Hey Bilbo," John said, as his daughter was deposited unceremoniously in his lap. She squealed shrilly and tried to insert her fingers into his left nostril.

"Gin?" he asked, eyebrows raised, as Mary passed him a glass. She plopped down on the couch next to him with a sigh of contentment.

"Hey, it's after five. I _love_ not working Saturdays."

"Shut up."

Mary grinned.

"What's this?" she said, indicating the postcard.

"Postcard."

Mary shot him a _Look._

"From Sherlock," he elaborated, reluctantly.

Mary reached across, and John was vaguely surprised at the difficulty she seemed to have in prising the card from his fingers. She turned the postcard over and skimmed it quickly, her eyebrows climbing higher and higher up her forehead.

"' _I love you'_?" she quoted sardonically.

"It's a code," John said quickly. "It doesn't mean – that."

"Right," she said; though the amused look she favoured him with was anything but believing.

.

It was after dinner, after Billie's bath and story and bedtime, when there was a knock at the door for the second time in as many nights. It was the same knock. John exchanged a wary look with his wife.

"I'll get it," he said.

Mycroft was waiting politely on the stoop, accompanied by Greg Lestrade and, to John's complete befuddlement, Molly Hooper. She greeted him with a hug and a kiss on the cheek – something that invariably made her blush. John had initially been discomforted by this, until he'd realised that Molly blushed no matter whom the recipient. He returned her hug, catching Greg's eye over her shoulder as he did so. Greg waggled his eyebrows salaciously, but didn't seem to feel the need to kiss him, and they settled instead for a masculine nod of acknowledgement.

Once they were all settled in the lounge, adequately provided with tea, coffee, gin and tonic, banana muffins and biscuits (according to taste), Mycroft opened proceedings.

"I would like to thank you all for coming," he said. From the looks on the faces of Molly and Greg, they hadn't had a lot of say in the matter.

"My proposal, as you are aware, is a relatively simple one: locate my brother, and bring him home."

"Your brother who is currently swanning around Cuba somewhere with a price on his head, right?" That was Greg, pithy as ever. "And this is simple how, exactly?"

"The execution, I grant you, may be a trifle problematic, but the premise is simplicity itself."

"Hang on a sec," John said. "What do you mean, 'a price on his head'? That's the first I've heard of it."

"Inspector Lestrade is being melodramatic," Mycroft huffed, sounding annoyed. John and Greg rolled their eyes at each other (melodrama: not something anyone could ever accuse _you_ of, right Mycroft?).

"Sherlock does not have a price on his head _per se,_ though there are certainly people out there who would like very much to kill him. I cannot fathom precisely what has led him to Cuba in the first place, so I cannot know for sure, but I am almost certain that he is walking into a trap."

John frowned. "He was following up on that agent bloke, you said. What do we know about him?"

Mycroft folded his hands together on the table in front of him. "At one time, I knew him well. He went by the work-name 'Knight' and he was killed in Germany eleven years ago."

"But Sherlock thinks he's found something about him…" Mary said slowly. "What?"

"As to that, I do not know. Perhaps information, which he may have managed to pass to a third party before he died. Perhaps Sherlock believes that he escaped – left the service; made a new life for himself – though I find it hard to credit; the man I knew was exceptionally loyal. In either case, any new intelligence regarding him will be of interest to a large number of organisations – Soviet and Middle Eastern, of course, but also to the Chinese, the Americans, and sundry others. Knight was a powerful weapon in the British service, and he had a great deal of knowledge regarding our protocols and service personnel that could, in the right hands, still be exceptionally valuable today."

"So that means Sherlock will have an advantage, won't he?" John asked slowly. "If he's not playing by your rules."

Mycroft allowed himself a thin smile.

"It is possible," he said. "Sherlock's methods have always been somewhat – _unorthodox._ But I would not count on this to save him. Sherlock was already a person of interest to those with eyes at the time of Knight's death, and anything that Knight knew of him may now be known by others. Then, too, Sherlock has achieved a degree of notoriety in the recent past which has brought him to the attention of even the general public. I think we can take it as read that others will also have been watching."

John winced internally, recognising the barb. His damn blog. Sometimes it seemed like the only people reading it were drug lords, spies and serial killers.

"At any rate," Mycroft continued, "my brother seems to think that there is something in these rumours that is worth risking his life for. It only remains to determine how best we can prevent him from doing so."

There was a sceptical silence. John dunked a biscuit in his tea, looking around at the others. A doctor, a diplomat, a police officer, a pathologist, and a part-time nurse. Oh, and a baby. Let's not forget the baby. Greg voiced the thought for him:

"Look, I don't want to sound defeatist Mycroft, but what makes you think we have a hope in hell of pulling this off? We're all too old and too fat and too boring to be going up against the bloody secret police or the communist resistance or whatever the hell they have over there."

"Don't be ridiculous, Inspector," Mycroft snapped. He seemed, for the first time, affronted. "Do you think I would have suggested it if it were untenable? Between us, we have every skill set that we are likely to need. Three of the four of you are trained in the use of firearms. Two of you –" (he indicated John and Mary) "are good at it."

"Gee, thanks," Greg grumbled.

"I am positive that you will improve with practice," said Mycroft magnanimously.

"And me?" Molly asked awkwardly. "What am I supposed to do? I mean, I want Sherlock back, of course I do, but I can't um… shoot people or - or anything. I mean, if you get killed I can do your autopsies…"

John winced, hearing Sherlock's voice in his head ( _Don't_ _try to make jokes Molly_ ); but rather to his surprise, Greg chuckled. Molly looked startled for a moment, and flushed pink, but she met Greg's eyes with a pleased smile. John wondered how on earth he'd missed _that_ one.

Mycroft raised an imperious eyebrow. "You, Miss Hooper, are included in the capacity of babysitter." He smiled blandly. "For those occasions when John and Ms. Agnew are otherwise engaged."

John clenched his teeth. "Mary's not coming," he snapped.

Mycroft had been referring to Mary as 'Ms. Agnew' since the day Sherlock had been shot. Just another subtle reminder that half the world's secret services knew John's own wife better than he did.

Mary herself had never appeared troubled by the epithet. John still didn't know the details of what had transpired between her and Mycroft while he had been in a speeding ambulance clutching Sherlock's cold, still hand or in the hospital waiting room praying every prayer he could remember. The summary of events, so far as he could gather, consisted of "Mary shot Mycroft's brother; Mycroft threw Mary into a wall". He had no idea how much of this stuff Greg and Molly knew. Judging by their perplexed expressions, it wasn't a whole lot.

He would have thought his wife would be pleased to have an excuse to have nothing further to do with Mycroft Holmes. Apparently, he was wrong.

"Mary _is_ coming," she insisted. "I want Sherlock back too, you know."

"That's not the point," John growled. "Billie needs someone to look after her and that someone is her mother."

"What, because I'm the _woman_?"

"No, because he's _my_ friend."

"And I'm a better shot than either of you, so if there's anyone who'll be staying home minding the baby it'll be _you_ John Watson."

"Mary –" John began, but Mycroft broke in:

"Ms. Agnew's assistance will be exceptionally useful, John. Miss Hooper can travel with you as far as Cuba, at which point you can put her and Miss Watson on a plane to New Zealand. I have an old associate there who can keep them safely out of harm's way. It has the additional benefit of strengthening your cover – four friends on holiday, two couples and a child – what could be more natural?"

Molly flushed pink again at the mention of the word 'couples'. Greg's eyes flicked to John, and then hastily away.

"I notice you're not including yourself in this, Mycroft," Mary said sweetly. "Where precisely will you be?"

"In Tokyo, at least initially."

Mary raised her eyebrows. "Oh?"

"I have a mind to add one other to our number. I'm sure you remember Ms. Adler, John?"

John's head whipped round so fast he spilled his tea.

"What?"

Mycroft smiled. "I think she will prove useful, don't you?"

"You're not serious. She's –"

"Alive and well and living in Tokyo, yes."

John glowered. "So all that stuff about her being beheaded in Pakistan?"

Mycroft gave an elegant shrug of one shoulder. "Sherlock rescued her. I've never quite been able to fathom why. But she got in touch a few years ago and she's been rather useful since, I must say."

"That complete _cock_." John swore. "That smug, know-it-all bastarding _cock_."

Mycroft smirked. "Isn't he?"

"Adler's the woman from that Christmas, right?" Greg asked, brow furrowed. "The – um – dominatrix."

Molly's blush, this time, was full-on sunset. John guessed she didn't have too many happy memories associated with that particular holiday. Mary's eyebrows were raised so high up her forehead that they were in danger of disappearing.

"And how exactly is a _dominatrix_ going to be useful?" she asked. John's blog post about the Irene-thing, he remembered belatedly, had been rather short on specifics.

"Oh, she'll be useful," Mycroft said, amused. "She has no particular talent with weaponry, I'll admit, but she is _exceptionally_ persuasive."

"If persuasion's necessary, why can't Mary do it?" John growled.

"Gee, thanks love. Your chivalry knows no bounds, it really doesn't."

"With all due respect," Mycroft said firmly, "Ms. Agnew is a forty-one year old mother, and was still breastfeeding a child until two months ago. Ms. Adler, by contrast, is thirty-four, with the body of a twenty-five year old."

"Mycroft!" Greg scolded. Mycroft utterly failed to look abashed.

John frowned. "Mary's thirty-eight."

"Mm… forty-one, I think you'll find."

"Oh _bloody_ Christ."

Mary scowled venomously. "Thanks for your support, John."

"So that's a 'yes' to Ms. Adler then?" Mycroft asked, ignoring them. He flipped open the sleek leather briefcase that sat at his feet and began handing around sheaves of paper. John's was a towering stack thirty pages high.

"Your instructions and itineraries are here. Please destroy them once you have committed them to memory. My flight leaves first thing tomorrow, so from that point on we shall have no further contact until we rendezvous. I anticipate that I will have four days before I am missed, but I trust that you realise the importance of staying below the radar. My people should have no reason to associate you with my apparent disappearance, but all the same, do not draw attention to yourselves."

"Woah, hang on Mycroft, wait a sec. We've all got work and stuff. We can't just all bugger off to Cuba together on holiday. It'll look suspicious as fuck."

"You are not 'buggering off to Cuba', Detective Inspector. You are enjoying an extended European cruise with several close friends, booked, I think you will find, eight months in advance. Alerts appeared in your superiors' calendars last night, reminding them that you are due to take leave in a week's time."

"Oh for the love of – that is _never_ going to work Mycroft."

"It will," Mycroft said, with his most shark-like smile. "Trust me."

"For Greg and Molly, maybe," Mary frowned. "They work in big offices with lots of staff. But there's only six of us at the clinic and Sarah will _know_ she hasn't given us leave."

Mycroft nodded. "I concur," he said. "Which is why you will need to approach her directly. Tell her whatever you need to, but you _must_ be on that plane. We rendezvous in Cuba sixteen days from now."

.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** My grateful thanks to everyone who has reviewed, particularly to Lady Zephyr, who's left thoughtful comments on everything _Sherlock_ -related I've ever written. The songs quoted in this chapter, for those who care about such things, are 'Daniel' (Elton John); 'We Don't Have to Look Back Now' (Puddle of Mudd); 'Congratulations' (Blue October); 'Someone Like You' (Adele); and 'Sex on Fire' (Kings of Leon). Apparently, John has eclectic tastes in music. :-P


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four.

.

"Boarding in five minutes sir," the woman said, leaning down to speak confidentially to a business-suited man who was engrossed in the contents of a brown manila folder.

"Thank you, Genevieve."

The woman thus addressed straightened, glancing casually around the Heathrow executive lounge. Aside from a bartender and a morose-looking Taiwanese businesswoman surrounded by empty tequila glasses, they were alone. The woman relaxed fractionally.

"Do sit down, Genevieve."

"No thank you, Mr Ellis."

The woman's eyes scanned the entrances, flicking over the large plate-glass windows. She gave her employer a cursory once-over. His charcoal-coloured suit was immaculate, as ever; his nails were neatly manicured, and his jaw so smooth that he could have been freshly shaven. His hair was getting a little long, she noted with a frown. She would have to arrange time for him to get it cut before the meeting with his American counterpart.

A genteel electronic beep sounded, and the woman checked her watch.

"Two minutes sir. We should move."

Mycroft Holmes was already standing, slipping the folder back into his briefcase.

"Thank you, Genevieve. I shall not, in fact, be coming with you."

The woman looked at him in polite confusion. "Sir?"

"I am sure you will manage admirably without me."

"And you will be?"

"As a matter of fact, I shall be in North Korea. I have recently obtained a new contact there, and it is vital that we meet in person. My flight leaves in forty minutes. I apologise for the deception, but I did not wish it to be generally known."

The woman lifted her own briefcase and fell into step with him as they left the executive lounge and made their way briskly to the gates.

"Do you need me to cover for you?"

"If you would, please. I shall need at least four days. You will understand if I don't make contact."

"Understood sir."

They had reached the gate. The woman retrieved a passport from the pocket of her blazer and handed it to a bored-looking attendant. The name on the passport wasn't Genevieve, but that was alright: it wasn't her name either.

Mycroft Holmes put a hand on the woman's shoulder and leant down to kiss her lightly on the cheek.

"Goodbye, my dear. Have a pleasant flight."

The woman nodded. "You too, Mr Ellis. See you in Washington."

Mycroft's mouth quirked almost imperceptibly. "I look forward to it."

* * *

"You're going on leave," Sally said flatly.

"Yep."

"You're going on leave for three weeks, in five and a half days' time, and you somehow failed to mention this to me."

"Um… yep."

Sally groaned, and sank down onto the corner of his desk, rubbing her eyes with one hand.

"I'll make it up to you," Greg promised. He prised open his Sergeant's fingers and pushed a large cup of expensive café coffee into her hand. Mentally, he patted himself on the back for his foresight.

Sally raised the cup automatically, still looking as though she could cheerfully have murdered him.

"You know we've got the Timson trial starting next week, right? And there's the Lambeth murder, and that weird fridge thing…"

"…And your Inspector's exam," Greg finished, wincing. How the hell could he have forgotten that one?

"Yeah," Sally sipped morosely at her cappuccino.

"Oh hell. I'm sorry Sal'. I can't even promise that I'll be in email contact."

"It's fine. I'll manage somehow."

"You'll be amazing," Greg told her, honestly. "You really, really will."

"Yeah… thanks chief." She didn't sound convinced.

"You taking the boys?" Sally asked, after an awkward pause.

"Uh, no actually. Dumping them on my brother for three weeks." And hadn't _that_ been a fun conversation? Sodding Mycroft sodding Holmes, contrary to myth, did _not_ think of everything.

"So who're you going with?"

"John and Mary and the kid. And, uh – Molly Hooper."

Startled out of her contemplation of her coffee cup, Sally looked over at him, her dark eyes wide with surprise.

"Something going on there that you're not telling me?"

"Not at all."

"You're blushing."

"I am not!"

"You are, you know."

"Don't be ridiculous, Donovan!"

"Oh, so it's Donovan now is it?"

"I've had about enough of your lip, Sergeant."

Sally grinned. "Enjoy it while you can, boss. By the time you get back, you'll be calling me sir."

"As if."

Sally sighed, suddenly gloomy again. She swung her heels against the leg of his desk and took a disconsolate sip of her coffee.

"I still can't believe you're leaving me on my own."

"I'll owe you dinner."

"At the very least." She rubbed her knuckles into her eyes and ran a hand across her hair; the curls sprang back in its wake. "It's honestly enough to make me want Holmes back, some days."

Greg chuckled. "Be careful what you wish for," he said.

* * *

Sarah Sawyer shoved open the door of the break-room with her hip, arms loaded with clean tea towels and boxes of biscuits, and stopped short in the doorway. Mary Watson was sitting on one of the faded blue armchairs with a mug of tea in front of her, and crying.

"Mary!" Sarah exclaimed, dropping the tea towels hastily on the bench. "Are you alright? What's wrong?"

"Oh!" Mary looked up, startled, and tried to scrub the tears away with the back of her hand. "Oh God, Sarah, I'm so sorry. It's just – just something that John said."

Sarah hastened to the chair beside Mary's and offered her arm for a hug. With a choking sort of sob, Mary leaned into her.

"What's that horrible little man been up to now?" Sarah asked. Mary gave a watery chuckle.

"It's probably nothing. I'm being silly. Just hormones and stuff. Stupid baby." She sniffed.

"What's John done?"

"Oh, it was just something he said about Sherlock. You know, sometimes I think that it's Sherlock he's really in love with… that he only married me to spite him."

"Hey… you know that's not true."

"But it's like he's not even the same person with Sherlock gone," Mary sobbed. "The baby's teething, and we're up all hours of the night, and we barely talk, but it's like John doesn't even notice… All he does is talk about Sherlock-this and Sherlock-that and how he can't wait till Sherlock gets home…"

Mary buried her face in her employer's shoulder and sobbed desperately. To a completely arbitrary observer, it might, perhaps, have appeared just the tiniest bit theatrical.

"Hey…" Sarah said, patting her on the back. "Hey, it's ok. John and Sherlock have always been dicks about each other. That's just the way they are."

"I know that," Mary mumbled. "And I don't want to blame him for it, I really don't. It's just all been too much these past few months… And then John…"

"Alright, Mrs Watson, here's what we're going to do. _You_ are going to take a holiday. You _and_ your husband. You're going to take a couple of weeks off, you're going to go to some nice sunny tropical beach, and you're going to work it out, ok? And if John's still being a dick when you come back, then I'll fire him for you. Sound good?"

Mary gave another slightly watery laugh. "We can't just leave you short-staffed. I took so much time on maternity leave last year…"

"Hush," Sarah said. "No more of that. I'll manage, alright? God knows I'm used to John buggering off whenever he feels like it. Trust me, a week's notice is a dream by comparison."

"Well, if you're sure…"

"Of course I am. Now, you cheer up and spend ten minutes Googling flights to Santa Monica. It'll make you feel better."

Mary smiled, a dimple appearing surreptitiously in her cheek. "I'm sure it will," she said.

* * *

Mary's method of convincing Sarah to give them leave was _not_ what John would have chosen. She recounted the story gleefully to Greg and Molly over drinks on Tuesday, causing Greg to laugh uproariously and Molly to stuff her knuckles in her mouth to smother her giggles. Neither of them, to John's immense irritation, seemed to consider Mary's story even remotely implausible.

"I wish you wouldn't do that," he said softly, later that night. They were lying in bed, John's hand brushing lightly over Mary's hip in small, abstracted strokes.

"Do what?" she asked.

"Say that stuff about me and Sherlock. I know everyone else does, but I wish you wouldn't."

She turned her head to look at him. In the darkness, she couldn't make out his features.

"I didn't realise it bothered you," she said, frowning. "You usually just laugh it off."

"Usually, the people saying it aren't my wife. And it's not true. It's never been true."

"I know it's not true John…" she hesitated a moment, then continued. "But I also know that you would have married him years ago if he hadn't happened to have a Y-chromosome."

 _Was she right_? John wondered. _Would he have done_? He didn't think so. Sherlock, he couldn't help but think, would be just as aloof, just as unobtainable female as he was male. It was one of the things that made him Sherlock. Somehow, nobody else seemed to understand that about him. They persisted in seeing him as a sexual creature, as someone who could be won over, when he just – _wasn't_. Oh, he could fake it, alright. He knew the actions and the words, but it never affected him personally. John had no doubt that he could _learn_ , if he so chose – but it would take something rather more phenomenal than John H. Watson.

He couldn't even try to articulate that to Mary. Not without sounding like he'd put an unhealthy amount of time into considering his friend's sex life.

"I wouldn't have," was all he said, instead.

"It's not a bad thing," Mary persisted softly. "It doesn't mean I think you're going to jump him the moment my back's turned. But I've just – I've never known two people who fit more perfectly than you."

John was silent. He'd never known any either.

"Not that I can really picture what Sherlock would be like as a woman," Mary laughed – a deliberate effort to lighten the mood. "God, I can't even imagine it."

"Like Irene," John said, his fingers stilling at the thought. "He'd be like Irene."

Mary rolled over on her hip until she was facing him. Her hand reached out beneath the covers to land across his ribs.

"Who's Irene?" she asked, her frown apparent in her voice. "John?"

"Adler," John explained thickly. "Irene Adler. The woman Mycroft's gone to find."

Mary frowned again, her eyes searching his face in the darkness. John didn't know what she was looking for. He wasn't sure he wanted to.

* * *

The week fled by frighteningly fast. Between memorising instructions from Mycroft, picking up suspicious parcels from even more suspicious locations and posting them to obscure addresses in Eastern Europe, and spending his work days feigning emotional coldness towards his wife (he did think that Mary might have put a _teensy_ bit more thought into her excuses before she dropped him in it), John was slightly panicked to realise that Friday night had rolled around and he was boarding a plane to France.

"You think Mycroft might have bothered to get us business class," Greg muttered in his ear as they fought to stow a bassinet in the overheard locker.

"Wouldn't fit with our _cover_ ," John grunted, agreeing.

Given a choice of laps to sit on, Billie opted for Greg's. She whinged a little on take-off, but otherwise seemed reasonably happy to turn the pages of a cloth book backwards and forwards at dizzying speed and chew on Greg's fingers whenever she could get away with it. Greg was good with kids, John thought, smiling a little to himself. From the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Molly, and his mouth twitched. It seemed that she'd also noticed.

* * *

The woman who stepped from the passenger seat of the black taxi had very little luggage. She took two bank notes from her purse to pay the driver, and shouldered her small overnight bag. The taxi driver didn't pull away immediately. The woman made her way up the street towards a block of tall flats, her beautifully-shaped legs moving quickly. Her hips swayed beneath a cream-coloured pencil-skirt. The taxi driver eyed them beadily. At last, just before the block of flats, the woman turned aside, vanishing into a narrow alleyway. The driver sighed, flicked on his indicator, and pulled back out into the traffic.

.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five.

 _._

Irene Adler let herself into the building with a key provided by a friend. Or at least, a man she knew. The apartment was on the fifth floor, but she ignored the lift, moving lightly up the first staircase. A second key let her into the apartment. She pulled the door to behind her until she heard the quiet snick of the lock. The apartment was light and airy – inexpensive, a little shabby, but tasteful for all that.

There was a man in the kitchen. A tall man, broad in the shoulders, trim-waisted. He hadn't seen her – he was facing the bench, chopping carrots with precise, economical movements. For a minute, Irene stood back and observed him. A shirt of deep indigo, rolled to the elbow and open at the collar; dark, superbly-tailored trousers that emphasised the curve of his arse; dark hair, a little longer than she'd last seen it, curling loosely at the nape of his neck. Moving noiselessly, Irene slipped her overnight bag onto the end of the bed and struck an easy pose in the doorway behind him.

"Hello Mycroft."

"Ms. Adler."

Mycroft laid down his knife and turned towards her. He inclined his head in acknowledgement and retrieved two glasses of red wine from the sideboard to his right. Irene accepted hers with a nod of thanks. No point in asking how he knew when she'd be arriving.

She let her eyes run openly up his frame, noting the way the shirt lay taut over his pectorals, the black leather belt, the pale skin exposed by the open collar.

"You're looking good, Mycroft," she said, a flicker of admiration in her voice. Mycroft raised one eyebrow sardonically. Irene laughed.

"Any particular reason you're impersonating Sherlock?"

"I thought it might come in useful," Mycroft said drily. "I can assure you that the sacrifice of my morning teacakes has not, so far, proved worth it."

"Oh, I don't know about that."

The illusion wasn't perfect. You couldn't hide seven years' difference in age with a change of clothes and a few skipped haircuts. Mycroft was still the heavier of the brothers, with a certain softness lingering about the hips and abdomen despite the forfeited brunches. The skin exposed by his open collar was faintly freckled, his mouth smaller, the set of his features less remarkable. The half-grown curls spilling over his forehead, however, did an admirable job of hiding the receding hairline. She wondered, in a moment of impishness, if that was why Sherlock did it.

"Did John notice?" she asked, genuinely curious. Mycroft rolled his eyes.

"What do you think?"

"In some ways that speaks well of him, you know. Suggests he's not just in it for your brother's pretty face."

"As I'm sure you are aware," Mycroft said drily, "My face is unchanged."

"Mmm... I didn't know your hair was curly."

"An excellent argument for keeping it short, believe me."

Irene ran her eyes over the length of his body again, making sure he noticed. Mycroft huffed.

"Are you quite done?"

"Just enjoying the view. Shall we have dinner?"

"It will be ready in twenty minutes."

"That wasn't what I meant."

"You shock me."

"Nothing shocks you."

"No."

"So… Dinner?"

.

She came to lean against the counter in the kitchen to watch him. His movements were methodical and unhurried, but with an easy dexterity that recalled his brother. They were alike, Irene thought. The clothes helped, of course, but the resemblance had always been there – little mannerisms, little tells. The shift of muscles beneath his shirt as he worked was unexpectedly alluring.

The meal was jasmine rice and Thai green curry – nothing complex, but pleasant. She should have guessed that Mycroft would be like this. Beneath the pretension and the ostentatious trimmings of power there lay a surprising austerity of manner. Another thing he had in common with Sherlock.

When the dishes were cleared away, Mycroft settled himself in an armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, his steepled hands finding their accustomed position against his chin. He scrutinised her intently, eyes moving over her in that familiar, roving way. Another man, she thought wryly, would have been appreciative, but to him it was merely data. She wondered what story her body told.

Guilelessly, Irene reached up and began unpinning her hair. The arrangement was complex, and not easily unravelled. Mycroft watched her, unblinking.

When her hair was loose, falling in heavy waves behind her, the woman slipped out of her shoes. Perched on the arm of the sofa, she unrolled her stockings and slipped them over her feet. Then she stepped forward and came to stand over the armchair where Mycroft Holmes watched.

For the first time, a smile touched Mycroft's mouth.

"As incorrigible as ever, I see."

"Did you expect anything else?"

"No; but we have work to do. Business before pleasure, Ms. Adler."

"Oh, I think that we can manage to combine both, don't you?"

.

* * *

There was something very strange, John thought, in travelling the world this way – as part of some immense, complex, Mycroftian scheme. He should have been thrilled – the chance for a family holiday on someone else's money, with good wine and good friends. Yet he could not help feeling that the clock was against them; that every day spent posing with his daughter in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Berlin Wall, the Colosseum or Saint Peter's was another day with no trace of Sherlock Holmes. He was twitchy and snappish, constantly on the alert, and missing Sherlock so keenly that he could scarcely focus. A mystery with Sherlock as the _subject_ made no sense. It was all wrong, inverted the natural order of things.

They had met their tour group at the hotel in Paris. They were for the most part inoffensive, if a little dowdy. Middle-aged couples second-honeymooning and retired baby-boomers desperate to grasp a little more of life before it was too late. Following their instructions from Mycroft, they had downplayed their own histories – John was a suburban GP, not an army surgeon; Greg was a plain old copper, not a detective; Molly, rather vaguely, 'worked at the hospital'; and Mary, oddly enough, had never been an international assassin. Upon learning that John was a doctor, several of their fellow travellers had been inclined to tediousness on the subject of their own ailments; yet they were, on the whole, innocuous and reasonably pleasant company. John couldn't help but wonder whether, if this rescue attempt failed, this holiday was to prove a snapshot of his future. In a life without Sherlock Holmes, what would he be? An over-qualified GP with a little nuclear family and occasional holidays with equally normal friends – none of them remarkable anymore; none of them with that edge of danger and idiocy that once they'd revelled in. Sherlock would be just a story to their kids – a story met with rolled eyes and supercilious teenage slang, because by then it would be assumed that the myth must have usurped the man, that no one could possibly do the things that Sherlock Holmes had done.

The other three didn't seem to share John's anxiety, or if they did, they hid it better. Mary and Molly were having the time of their lives; they spent hours sightseeing, ticking off landmarks in colourful little brochures, cheerfully queueing for a glimpse of the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel. But the hours spent sightseeing paled into insignificance compared to the hours spent shopping; John hadn't known that the continent _contained_ so many shops – shoes and handbags and perfumes, dresses and scarves and souvenir knick-knacks, things neither woman had hitherto shown the faintest interest in. John was uncertain quite how much of this was genuine and how much 'cover', but he still had to dissuade Mary from purchasing a pair of beer stein bookends, an enormous wall hanging of Michelangelo's David, and a full-scale replica of the Manneken Pis ("it would be _amazing_ in the guest bedroom, don't you think?").

Even Greg hadn't seemed immune to the holiday atmosphere. Practically the moment their flight landed in Paris, he had donned a pair of colourful shorts and an enormous, decrepit straw hat. He spent mornings climbing hills or strolling along waterfronts, hunting out tiny little hole-in-the-wall eateries and returning laden with squares of baklava, girls' phone numbers and bottles of excellent wine.

By default, almost, John had ended up spending most of his days with Billie. He'd tried to make an effort to blend in, aware that if any of them were to be recognised it would likely be him. For the first few days he'd tagged along on bus excursions to old ruins and listened gamely to Mrs Mossman from Brixton, who told him all about her problems with her daughter. After a while though his heart just hadn't been in it. While the others went off exploring, John would take Billie to the closest park, where they would go for little walks at her slow, disjointed pace, stopping every few metres to examine cracks in the pavement or bits of brightly-coloured rubbish, snails or patches of clover or butterflies. Mrs Mossman and the other ladies began to smile at him, indulgent and perhaps a little pitying ("He's a bit of a homebody, isn't he?"; "Not much of a one for excitement"; and "I see you've got him well-trained, Mrs Watson"). John was reminded of his first day with Sherlock, of Mrs Hudson's complacent soothing ("I can see you're more of the sitting down type"). The memory gave him a pang of nostalgia, more painful than warranted by the words themselves.

John tried to express his anxiety to Greg, one sunny afternoon in Budapest. Billie had been in a fractious mood that morning and they hadn't moved far from the hotel, merely finding a small bench outside in the street where they could watch the locals come and go, and where Billie could spot pigeons – an all-consuming hobby. For an hour and a half they sat on the same bench while Billie pointed out every new arrival to John with steadfast dedication and great solemnity. It reminded him, in a strange way, of entertaining Sherlock.

It was close to two, and John had begun to think vaguely about returning to the hotel and finding Billie a snack, when Greg appeared. He had a loaf of bread under one arm and the by-now-ubiquitous bottle of red swinging from his hand. He waved when he saw them, and was then required to keep waving solemnly for the entire length of the street, answering Billie's rapidly opening-and-shutting fist.

"Hey," he said, slumping down onto the bench next to them. "How you doing Bilbo?"

Billie scrambled over John's lap to get to Greg, her small heel jabbing sharply into her father's thigh. John winced, and rubbed the abused region. For reasons best known to herself, his daughter loved Greg with the sort of ardent devotion she had never displayed towards either of her parents, nor to her Aunt Harry or Nana Hudson. John didn't take it personally, though he had made a mental note not to introduce her to either of Greg's sons until she was at least twenty-five – particularly if they showed any signs of having inherited their father's fondness for motorbikes.

"Duck!" Billie informed Greg seriously, pointing to one of her many winged followers. Greg raised his eyebrows, lifting her beneath the armpits until she stood upright on his lap.

"Duck, huh? Weird. Looks like a pigeon to me."

"Duck."

"If I might interrupt this stimulating discourse on avian biology," John said drily, "How was your morning, Greg?"

Greg chuckled, though Billie looked rather offended at her father's lack of appreciation for her linguistic talents.

"Not bad," Greg said. "Walked along the riverfront for a bit. Some pretty ladies down there. Some _very_ pretty ladies." He waggled his eyebrows, and John grinned.

"An old man like you has no business noticing pretty ladies."

"You wouldn't say that if you'd seen them, believe me."

They faded into silence for a while. A pigeon pursued a cheeky sparrow, chasing it away from the small scattering of crumbs left by Greg's loaf of bread. Billie scolded the pigeon soundly, flailing her pointed finger in a fair impersonation of Mary's motherly wrath, to the complete and utter indifference of both birds.

"You alright?" Greg asked abruptly, looking sideways at John with an oddly scrutinising expression. John passed a hand through his hair, wondering what he could say.

"Just a bit edgy," he settled on, shrugging. "I can't help but feel like none of this is getting us any closer to Sherlock, y'know?"

"Yeah, I know. But Mycroft knows what he's doing, I reckon. We just need to trust him."

"I wish I could believe that."

Greg looked at him again, his eyes disconcertingly kind – the type of look that was only a small step from 'gentle' to 'pitying'.

"He'll be ok, John. He bounces back – he always does."

"He always does," John echoed, subdued. "Until one day he won't. He's not invincible."

"No, but he does a pretty good impression of it."

 _But not without me,_ John wanted to say. _Not without me at his back._ It wasn't true, of course – Sherlock, despite his tendency to behave like an oversized toddler, was a grown man, and better able to look after himself than most. That didn't stop John from feeling as though something was very wrong with the world when Sherlock was left alone. He couldn't say that to Greg though – not without seeming pathetic, and not without receiving another of Greg's patented 'Are you _sure_ you're not in love with him?' speeches. Given that both Greg and John were, well, _blokes_ , these speeches tended to be supremely awkward for both parties and consisted largely of inference and things-we're-not-actually-saying.

"Come on," Greg said at last, correctly divining John's mood. "Let's go back to the hotel. I can dump this stuff, then we can find the ladies and convince them to give up their shoe-shopping and join us for dinner. I'll carry the monster."

He hoisted Billie onto his shoulders. She squealed, and wrapped her hands over his eyes. Patiently, Greg disentangled them.

John's brow scrunched upwards in an insinuating fashion. "You wouldn't rather that Team Watson just went off somewhere and left you and Molly alone?"

Greg's face remained to stoic, but John's experienced eye discerned a faint flush of pink creeping its way up his neck."Shut up," he said, gruffly.

"Ah, come on Greg. Just go for it. I'll be your wing-man."

Greg looked at him with uncharacteristic seriousness. "You're not my wing-man. You're his. And don't you forget it."

.

* * *

 **A/N:** Thanks to everybody who's commented or added this to their favourites list. If you're still reading and enjoying it, please leave a review. :-) If you're reading it and _not_ enjoying it, please tell me why not!


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six.

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Propped on one elbow, Irene watched Mycroft dress. He had turned away from her – rather primly, she felt – but she could see him reflected in the mirror: pale, freckled belly and sparse, copper-tinted hair. He fastened the buttons of his shirt from the top downward, spending precisely the same amount of time over each: fastidious, but not _fussy_. It was a new shirt, sky-blue. With practised movements, he added a pair of understated silver cufflinks and an Oxford-blue tie.

"Interesting…" Irene purred.

"Hmm?"

"Your need to reassert your own personality following sex."

Mycroft shot her a disdainful look. Irene smirked

"I've always thought there was something rather Freudian about sibling rivalry; don't you agree?"

"And the only thing that distinguishes me from my brother is a tie? How very distressing."

"A tie _and_ a pair of cufflinks. Sherlock doesn't like cufflinks."

"I am aware."

Irene rolled over onto her front, flicking her legs up behind her and looking coyly back at Mycroft over her shoulder. Mycroft's mouth twitched.

"As it happens," he told her, "And much as you may find it hard to believe, my desire to 'reassert my own personality' is not motivated solely by sexual jealousy of my baby brother. You and I are going out."

"Oh?"

"Yes. It's about time I started laying a false trail. Given that I have no doubt spectacularly offended my American counterpart by failing to arrive in Washington, I imagine that questions are beginning to be asked about my whereabouts. It will soon emerge, if it hasn't already, that I am also demonstrably absent from North Korea." He paused, straightening the lapels of his jacket. "A few discreet appearances in the company of the notorious Miss Adler should give them something to chew over once they finally manage to trawl through the surveillance tapes."

"You're a devious man, Mr Holmes."

"One does one's best."

* * *

The atmosphere around the varnished Whitehall conference table was tense. In normal circumstances that wouldn't have bothered Philippa Grey over-much. But then, in normal circumstances, Mycroft would have been beside her. Measuringly, she scanned the faces that surrounded her, trying to gauge where allegiances might lie. Harry Merton was one of theirs, she was certain. Harry had been their palace liaison – Lady's Man, in the Service's own peculiar argot – for close on twenty years now. Robert Braithwaite, head of the Lamplighters division, was theirs also – good, old fashioned public-school loyalty. Sir Peter Guillam, to Braithwaite's immediate left, would no more go against Mycroft than he would sell his soul. Despite his advanced age, Guillam still had one of the best strategic minds in the business, and a talent for field work unrivalled by many a younger man.

Apparently unconcerned by the dissension in the ranks, Sir Peter reached out and snaffled a chocolate digestive. He caught Pippa's eye across the table and winked – he had, she thought wryly, never liked the Americans.

Across the table from Guillam was the upright and aristocratic figure of Lady Smallwood, here to represent the Sisters (as MI5-branch was less-than-affectionately known). By all rights, Lady Smallwood should have been in Mycroft's camp as well – but then doing someone a favour, in Pippa's experience, was by no means a guarantor of their support.

It wasn't enough. Charles Burleigh and Frances Everard from Scalp-hunters; Dame Eleanor Fairfax from the Embassy; Lady Carlisle and Richard Tate from the Babysitters; Malcolm Ward from the Burrowers; and Sir Miles Etherington from Q-division. Too many people Mycroft had passed over or belittled; too many people Sherlock had exposed, eviscerated or outright insulted.

"I'm going to ask you again, Ms. Grey. Where is Mycroft Holmes?"

It was Lady Carlisle who spoke. A vicious bitch, by Pippa's private reckoning. Carlisle headed the Babysitters, the innocuously-named division that was responsible for 86% of all surveillance conducted in the United Kingdom, whether of suspected criminals, private citizens, or the Service's own personnel. She had hated Mycroft since the early nineties, at least.

"The last time I spoke to Mr. Holmes he was on his way to North Korea." Pippa repeated for the third time. "He hasn't contacted me since, but that isn't unusual. I assure you, there is no cause for alarm."

He'd asked her for four days. Four days to stall the Americans and bluff Whitehall while he met with his new contact – a contact, she privately suspected, who may not have been in North Korea at all. She'd managed to hold them off now for three days, sixteen hours, and counting. She prayed it would be enough.

Richard Tate tapped his pen impatiently against the arm of his chair. He leaned bullishly across the table, yellow eyes boring into Pippa's.

"He is not in North Korea."

Pippa allowed herself a tiny smirk. "How thoroughly have you looked?"

A flash of ire travelled across Lady Carlisle's perfectly-made face. Jessica Carlisle was a Lady only by virtue of having married an obscure member of the peerage some half-dozen years ago. Prior to that time she had, as everyone around the table knew, been one of the Service's American liaisons, working in counter-intelligence for the Cousins. Mycroft had not been alone in expressing his scepticism over her sudden defection.

"We're sure of our sources," Charles Burleigh huffed. "Are you seriously attempting to tell me that Holmes left no means of contacting him?"

"Have you tried his Twitter account?"

"You are very amusing today, Ms. Grey."

"I'm pleased you think so."

"Perhaps you'll allow me to put it another way," Lady Carlisle said. Her eyes narrowed malevolently. "You will find Mycroft Holmes. He will be at his post in Whitehall in twenty-four hours' time, unless he wishes to be brought in on charges of treachery and desertion."

"Steady on!" Harry Merton interjected. "There's no call for threats."

Old Guillam had removed his glasses and was, with gentle dedication, polishing them on the fat end of his tie. Without looking up, he gave a discrete cough, and even Charles Burleigh stopped blustering in order to listen. One didn't attain Guillam's age, in the Service, without the ability to be listened to.

"I think Holmes is entitled to a mystery or two, don't you?" his eyes twinkled a little as he glanced up at them. "What is the Service without secrets, after all?"

"And _I_ think that you will find yourself overruled, Guillam," said Lady Carlisle, her nostrils flaring. "Twenty-four hours, Ms. Grey."

* * *

Mary Watson stood with Molly Hooper on the pavement outside an extremely high-end Greek jewellery store, cooing rapturously over the contents of its display window. A sea of tasteless gold bangles, ostentatious jewels and obscenely-priced blood-diamonds confronted them. Mary gazed intently at the window, observing the shimmering mass keenly. A grey Honda was reflected in the glass. If she tilted her head at a particular angle she could read the licence plate. The characters were hardly likely to prove useful, however. No doubt they would be changed before the day's end.

The Watson-Hooper-Lestrade family holiday had been the subject of low-level surveillance for the past three days. It was not anything that the others would have noticed; it was subtle, and very carefully done. It was nothing that Mary herself would have noticed, if she had been who she ought to be. But there were formulae to Mary's profession – standard practices, classic formations, little pieces of common tradecraft, if you knew where to look. And Mary was always looking.

The grey Honda had been stalled in the parking bay opposite for twelve minutes now. An unusual length of time for a vehicle to pause without the driver making a move either to exit or to reach for his phone. Before the Honda had pulled in there had been a girl ahead of them – denim jacket and miniskirt and too-young-for-her pigtails; her phone had come out of her pocket the moment they paused in front of the jewellery store.

Mary stepped away from the window and walked on, Molly bobbing good-naturedly at her elbow. She was enthusing rather painfully about an engagement ring she'd spotted, with diamonds arranged like the petals of a flower ("Not that I'm engaged. I mean, I'm not even dating anyone... And I mean, we obviously wouldn't get engaged straight away, even if we… I mean, even if I _was…_ "). Mary winced internally. She needed to have a serious girl talk with Molly, one of these days.

In the glass-fronted office block ahead of them, Mary watched the reflection of the grey Honda flick on its indicator and pull casually out into the stream of traffic.

There were three options, she thought, musingly. The first, that her own handlers had become wise to the afterlife of Agent Agnew, she dismissed immediately. The surveillance was good, but not good enough for anyone who knew her. That should have ruled out Mycroft, but didn't entirely. The surveillance might have been ordered by him for their protection, with the tacit understanding that she would know it was there if necessary. Given how little he had professed to trust his own people, she didn't think it likely, but she'd be a fool to believe everything that came out of the mouth of Mycroft Holmes. The third option was whoever Sherlock had got himself entangled with; he'd been in Eastern Europe, she knew that much. There weren't so many big players there, these days, and a few she could eliminate immediately. That left Russia, Serbia, Ukraine or, at a stretch, Germany. More likely to be the Cubans though, since that's where Sherlock was apparently annoying people at present; run by way of China or North Korea, almost certainly. But intelligence was one of the oldest games in the world, and everybody sold to everybody else – it was just a matter of what and when. She considered it a moment, but it didn't fit. There had been nothing to link them to Sherlock for almost eighteen months, certainly no indication that they might be involved in whatever idiotic game he was playing. Mycroft's people, then. But not ordered by him – no. Ordered in his absence by someone who knew him well enough to suspect that he might use John as a backup if he ever dropped off the radar, but not well enough to have seen her own file.

It came to Mary in a rush, and she swallowed, forcing herself to breathe normally. Not Mycroft, and not his Second either. His rival. The coup had happened.

The coup had happened, and they were hunting him.

* * *

The woman had waltzed into Sally's borrowed office without so much as a by-your-leave. With a frown, Sally flipped closed the confidential file she'd been working on and minimised the document on her computer screen. The woman smirked, as though Sally had amused her.

"And you are?" Sally said, with a scowl. She resisted the urge to tilt back on the legs of her chair and put her feet on the desk ( _unprofessional, Donovan)_.

The woman smiled blandly. "I'm here to file a missing person's report."

Sally's eyes flickered over her uninvited guest in a rapid professional assessment: pretty face, expensive-looking hair, well-dressed, decidedly _not_ sensible shoes. She didn't miss that the woman had failed to answer her question.

"Not my division," Sally said dismissively, echoing her favourite holidaying prat. "Try the second floor."

"Oh, it's your division alright," the woman said. "Or if it's not, it will be soon.

She smiled at Sally. It was a perfectly pleasant smile. It made Sally wonder, unaccountably, why she'd ever dropped karate.

The woman tossed a manila folder onto the desk between them. There was an 8x6 black and white photograph attached to the front cover with a paper clip. With unusual wariness, Sally picked it up. From the photograph, the bland visage and eerie grey eyes of Mycroft Holmes stared back at her.

.

* * *

.

 **A/N:** A bit of a ladies' chapter this time round. I keep trying (and failing) to make this fic pass the Bechdel Test. All these intelligent women around, and all they ever want to talk about is the damn Holmes brothers! I briefly contemplated having Molly and Mary engage in a discussion about jewellery, but somehow that didn't exactly seem like a fulfilling alternative...

Also, as I'm sure some of you have noticed, much of the imagined structure of the 'Service' is nicked blatantly from John Le Carre. I make no apologies.

Keep those reviews coming, y'all!


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter Seven.

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John woke on Thursday morning with a jittery euphoria filling his belly. Today, their tour group was catching a plane for Saint Petersburg. And they were not going to be on it. Today, after almost two weeks of barely-restrained impatience, after sixteen months of waiting, they were going after Sherlock.

He could barely concentrate as he packed, stuffing clothes and toys haphazardly into his suitcase. On four separate occasions over the course of the morning Mary had to remind him of something he'd left behind, and twice she had to prevent him from accidentally stealing small items belonging to the hotel. They weren't taking the luggage with them, of course. No, they were leaving that carefully behind to be turned over by the inevitable investigation, so it was vital, as Mary kept reminding him, that everything was packed normally. John knew that his jitters were due to their weeks of inaction, and he waited with mounting anticipation for the moment when the calm would take over. His left hand was trembling so violently that he could scarcely get Billie into her overalls.

.

The task of excusing themselves from the Petersburg flight with the minimum of suspicion had fallen to Molly. Amongst a number of little-known facts about Molly Hooper was this: she was an excellent liar. It was not a talent that she exercised often – and this, she suspected, made it more effective. The thing was, people just never _noticed_ her. She'd known that for most of her life and, mostly, she didn't mind. When people thought about her at all, they thought 'awkward', 'nervous', 'inept'; sometimes 'shy', if they were feeling kind. And if she happened to stumble a bit when uttering a tiny un-truth, well, that was just Molly, wasn't it?

She dressed carefully on the morning of their departure. A nice sun-dress with a hemline that, back home, she would privately have considered rather brave ('It never hurts to show a bit of knee', as her grandmother had often said). She tied her hair back in a ponytail, then ran a hand over it a couple of times to give it an appropriately dishevelled appearance. As a crowning touch, she sat with Billie on her knee for half an hour until Billie obliged her by smearing mashed pumpkin in her ear and drooling on her shoulder.

Their tour guide was a slim young Parisian named Wadi. He wore mustard-coloured, hipsterish jeans, and put too much gel in his hair. A couple of years ago, Molly would probably have developed a crush on him. Now he just reminded her, rather wincingly, of her 'Jim' phase.

She timed her arrival in the hotel lobby very carefully. Too early and she'd give him too much time to think about it. Too late and when the police came calling (as they undoubtedly would), he'd remember it as suspicious.

"Hey chick," Wadi greeted her. She would have been flattered by the epithet, once upon a time. Now she just found it annoying.

"You lot all packed?" he asked her. He made a half-arsed show of paging through his itinerary, clicking his pen against his thigh. Through the hotel's tinted-glass door, she could see Mrs Mossman struggling to heft a bulging suitcase into the airport shuttle.

"Not exactly," Molly admitted. She made sure to catch Wadi's eye, treating him to her most awkward smile.

"The baby's come down with something," she explained apologetically. "I don't think it's serious, but John thinks she's got an ear infection, and if we get on the flight with her like that she'll just _scream._ "

Wadi frowned. "We can't wait, chick. You know we've got connections to make. We'll just have to bring the kid and chance it. Sure her dad can look after her."

"Um… He wants to take her to a hospital," Molly said, shaking her head rapidly. "I know it's really inconvenient and everything, and we don't want to hold everyone up. We'll just stay here for a few days and then maybe try to see if we can get a later flight. We can meet you in Moscow maybe."

But Wadi was shaking his head. "I can't just let you guys off on your own. Let me call in someone to take you to the hospital."

"We'll be fine," Molly assured him, quite truthfully. "We've been here three days, we know our way around. Please don't worry about us."

"Well, if you're sure…"

"I'm _so_ sorry," Molly reiterated. "We'll pay to change the flights ourselves, obviously. And I'll email you and let you know when we can meet back up again."

"Yeah, ok. Hey, sorry about the kid."

"Oh, um… I'm sure she'll be alright. Just… better to be safe than sorry, you know?"

"Yeah. Yeah, of course. Hey, I've got to help these guys get stuff loaded." He gestured over his shoulder at the luggage-laden tourists struggling with the shuttle. "Let me know when you sort it all out."

"Of course. Thanks. Um… sorry again."

"Hey, shit happens. We'll see you in Moscow, yeah?"

"Yeah," said Molly, smiling shyly. "Yeah, of course."

.

Concealed from view of the reception area by an ostentatious array of trellis work and potted palms, Mary watched Molly leave. There was a bounce in her step and a bit of a grin on her face as she hastened back towards the stairs. At the reception counter, a dark, handsome man with a discrete Bluetooth headpiece looked up from the form he was filling in and cocked his head in Molly's direction. His eyes followed her intently. When she was gone, he gave a quick, fierce glance around the lobby, and spoke quietly into his microphone. Mary couldn't hear the words from where she was standing, but she could make a reasonable guess.

Now, Mary thought, came the difficult part.

.

The two men, two women and a baby who slipped unobtrusively from a rear balcony of the hotel and into a pair of idling taxis looked rather different from the Greg, Molly, John, Mary and Billie who had arrived there with a tour group three days earlier. Mary was dark-haired and dressed in flat heels and an ugly pinstriped power-suit at least fifteen years out of date. Greg was in faded jeans and a football jersey, and seemed to have gained a decade and twenty kilos overnight. Molly, in thick eyeliner, oversized hoodie and skin-tight jeans, could have been a nineteen year old. The baby in her lap was chewing contentedly on a scruffy Barbie doll and wearing a nauseatingly pink Disney princess t-shirt (none too clean), about which her father would, in normal circumstances, have thrown a self-righteous feminist fit. The father in question had no room to talk, however, as he was currently seated alongside them sporting a black leather jacket, a tattooed neck, and a frankly alarming buzz-cut that he prayed to God Sherlock would never find out about.

At an anonymous mall in Downtown Athens, a small, tattooed man in a leather jacket visited a safety deposit box and retrieved an unremarkable FedEx parcel. From the parcel, he retrieved a battered leather wallet and a simple door key on a blue plastic tag. Unhurriedly, he made his way over to an idling taxi where a teenage girl and a grubby-looking child were waiting for him. He gave the blue key-ring a brief once-over, and grunted an address to the driver.

Half an hour later, in a dozy suburban street, a taxi pulled over outside number 10. The glum, fat man in the football jersey clambered laboriously from the backseat and waited dumbly on the pavement while the woman paid. She was a pinched, ugly-looking sort of woman herself, the driver thought, noting the unfashionable pumps and the ill-fitting blazer. Even as he pulled away, he could hear her berating the man, whose shoulders hunched defensively. Strangely, he thought he heard the man laugh.

If any neighbour had chanced to be looking out of their windows around one o'clock in the afternoon, they might have noticed the middle-aged couple making their way laboriously up the hill. A particularly _observant_ observer might have paused to wonder why their taxi hadn't dropped them at the gate; but, as it was a small mystery, in the grand scheme of things, it would have been easily forgotten. At number 43 the couple paused and the woman rang the bell. A few moments later, the door was opened by a skinny girl with a baby on her hip. The older couple stepped inside and the door was quietly shut behind them.

.

Secure inside the safe-house that Mycroft had arranged, they re-convened. The luggage and supplies that John had ordered while still in England were waiting for them, stacked tidily against one wall of the near-empty kitchen. Greg made toast and spaghetti for lunch and they ate sprawled about on the living-room floor as though at a picnic. Painstakingly, they packed and re-packed, removed their earlier disguises and adopted new ones. Molly, armed with a set of electric clippers, cropped John's hair into a slightly less alarming form. Then, all there was to do was wait.

.

They reached the airport without mishap – Mary as a harassed solo mother, and the other three as be-suited engineers on the way to a conference. They'd spotted no signs of surveillance since they'd left the hotel and Mary was hopeful that their unexpected evasive manoeuvres had thrown their pursuers off the scent, but she still hadn't breathed easily until they were safely ensconced on the flight from Athens to Istanbul.

From Istanbul, they flew to Chicago (a lawyer, a music teacher, and a pair of Mormon missionaries), and from Chicago to New York (a builder, a P.A., a truckie, and a virulently Scots banker – John was rather proud of that one). From there, they dodged up into Quebec, just to keep life interesting (a travel writer, a student, and a gay couple with their adopted daughter ( _'Is this weird? This feels weird.'_ ). By the time they reached Miami in the small hours of Sunday morning, Billie was _howling_.

Through it all, Mary managed them with a brutal efficiency. She knew precisely which of an airport's many toilets or prayer rooms or maintenance cupboards could be guaranteed to be unoccupied for long enough to change a skirt or don a fake tattoo. She knew how to apply small pieces of facial prosthetic in just such a way as to fool the scanners into accepting a fake passport, and which items from duty free could be added to enhance a disguise. She instructed them on how to talk and what to say, how to follow conversations so that they didn't contradict each other, where to stash their many passports so they didn't get confused. The competence with which she marshalled them left John with a slightly queasy feeling in his gut; the knowledge that this life, for Mary, had never really gone away.

Dazed, jet-lagged, and encumbered by an infant who was screaming with all the might and main at the disposal of her fifteen-month-old lungs, it seemed to John that their arrival in Florida could hardly have been more obvious. This state of events was not improved by his decision to have a very voluble row with the kitchenette facilities in the hotel room over their inability to provide him with a decent cup of tea. It took a great deal of conciliating on Mary's part before she was able to convince him to " _please put down the completely innocent and blameless kettle and please John, for the love of god, don't throw it at the w–"_

He decided right then and there that he _hated_ America.

* * *

Tomas Coulter, despite appearances, was not a stupid man. From the moment the woman had approached him, he had suspected a honey-trap. Coulter was aware enough of his own personal charms to realise that women of her calibre did not, typically, fall into his orbit. He was aware enough of _her_ charms to find her out of place in the shabby bar where she had picked him up, despite the unpractised make-up and the deliberately down-at-heel clothes. But Coulter was by nature a gambler. In a career that spanned thirty years in various secret services, this was hardly the first time that sex had been used as a little extra incentive. Coulter reckoned that it was worth the gamble. The woman would string him a long a little, give him a taste first, before she tried to reel him in.

He was confident in this assessment right up until the moment when the whip appeared.

.

* * *

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 **A/N:** Thanks as always to everyone who's reviewed. :-)


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight.

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John kicked himself out of the duvet and shuffled into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Christ, he was tired. There was a dull ache beneath his eyes, puffy with jetlag as they were, yet his all-to-hell circadian clock was insistently demanding that he get up.

As quietly as possible, trying not to wake Mary, John slipped out of bed and padded barefoot into the tiny bathroom. He filled a glass with water from the tap and gulped it down, wincing at the sight of his purple-ringed eyes. He filled the glass again and drank more slowly, leaning against the bathroom cabinet.

Sherlock had been in his dream.

It hadn't been _like that,_ he hastened to reassure the smug, insinuating little voice in his mind – the voice that usually sounded like Irene Adler, but sometimes like Greg or Harry or Mycroft or Mrs H. or, if it was feeling particularly cutting, his wife.

In his dream, he'd been watching the last Harry Potter movie. It was a real memory – something they'd done in that strange limbo-time after Sherlock had jumped; John and Greg, Greg's two boys, Sarah and Sally Donovan and Sally's brother Noah. They'd gone to the midnight screening along with half the teenagers in London, all of them with dorky glasses and lightning bolts painted on their foreheads and the kids wearing home-made cloaks over their pyjamas. In his dream Billie had been there too, which was stupid because Billie hadn't even been born then; Mary hadn't waltzed into their lives in the bar of the Cavalier, hadn't chatted Greg up over a pint, hadn't asked John who had died.

In his dream, Greg's youngest had wanted to hold Billie and John had handed her over, though he'd felt vaguely unsettled by thoughts of the six-year-old Sam taking Billie out on his motorbike. He'd looked up into the kid's face and noticed the lightning bolt scar; and then, when he'd turned to look over his shoulder, Sherlock had been there. There was a scar on Sherlock's forehead as well; or more accurately, a wound. The blood was dripping down the side of his face, but Sherlock hadn't seemed to mind. He'd just grinned at John, and John had heard his voice, a deep, rich murmur against his ear ( _The Game, John!_ ). And John, without a second thought, had got up and followed him.

After that, the dream had been jumbled. Just running, feet ringing against asphalt, chasing Sherlock's shadow; Sherlock leaping across gaps between buildings, reaching back a hand, giggling like a fool. And John had woken in a too-warm bed in a too-stifling hotel room with the realisation that he could scarcely even remember Sherlock's face.

He turned on the tap again and splashed his eyes with water. It ran off his chin and soaked the neck of his shirt.

John slouched back against the wall and pressed his fingertips against his eyelids, trying to remember Sherlock's face and coming up with nothing but an aching hollowness. It wasn't the specifics he was lacking – he knew the details. Long, angular face; high cheekbones; narrow, slightly slanted eyes. He knew all those things. What he couldn't picture was how they fitted into an integrated whole. If he concentrated, he could hold the image of Sherlock in his mind, but always slightly blurred, always missing some small nuance he couldn't have articulated if he'd tried. He was probably over-thinking it, he knew, but it still unsettled him more than it really should have.

Taking care not to wake Mary or Billie, John slipped back into the main room. He found the jeans that he'd discarded the previous evening and retrieved his phone from the pocket. Sinking down against the wall, he skimmed through his albums, searching for photos of Sherlock. There were only a handful. A short series of Sherlock on the couch (thinking; sulking; sprawled out like a diva with his forearm over his eyes). Sherlock with a stunned expression and a piece of toast dangling from his mouth. Sherlock on his arse in a puddle. A grainy shot of the two of them passed out in a police cell. And that was all. Not much to show for the best years of his life. You'd think he might have learnt that lesson, after the fall.

Paging through them again, John paused at the shot of Sherlock thinking; it was one of the few in which his face was properly visible. John studied the photo, trying to remember how that face moved – the way he winked; the way he tucked in his chin against his chest when he was playing coy; the lines that appeared in parallel with his jaw when he laughed. He looked at the photo for a long time. Finally, he shoved the phone back into his pocket and went to see if Billie needed changing.

* * *

Coulter couldn't help the flinch that ran through him as the woman snapped the whip mere inches from his face. The crack of it rang, shockingly loud, in his ears.

Bitterly, Coulter castigated himself for his own idiocy in having allowed her to tie him to his bed. He'd been too caught up in the fantasy of it to think about the implications, and now he was cursing himself for a fool.

He still had options. He was minus his boots but otherwise still fully clothed, and he was only tied by the wrists; he could probably tear the fabric, given time. He was ninety percent certain that the woman was after information; he could placate her with what she wanted and convince her to let him go. He needed to find out who she was working for.

His options became significantly more limited when the woman stepped _away_ from the bed, placing the business-end of her whip directly against his crotch.

She lowered her lashes coyly, her red mouth curving in a coquettish smile. "I think Tomas here is ready to talk, don't you?"

Coulter choked on a gasp as a tall man emerged from the patch of shadow beside the wardrobe. _How long had he been there?_

The tall man stepped forward into the light and placed a proprietary hand on the woman's shoulder. "I must say, my dear, it is a pleasure to watch you work."

Tomas Coulter sagged back into the pillows, gasping with the sheer relief of released adrenaline.

"Ice Man. _You_ _prick._ _You utter prick_."

Mycroft Holmes smiled urbanely. "Hello Tomas."

" _Christ…_ Prick… Nearly gave me a heart attack. Bloody Christ…"

Mycroft did not reply. Hitching up the knees of his trousers, he lowered himself into Coulter's chair and steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. Irene perched on the chair's arm and crossed her legs, idly tracing the toe of her boot with her whip.

"Alright, what's this about then?" Coulter asked, still huffing. He flexed his forearms against the restraints on his wrists. "You can let me go, you know."

"Mm. I think not, actually."

"What the hell do you mean?"

"You were in Amsterdam a week and a half ago. You acted as a contact for a man named Sigerson. You undertook to send a postcard for him, from Copenhagen."

"Yeah, so?"

The tips of Mycroft's index fingers twitched. "Who did he talk to, Tomas? Who sent him to Cuba?"

"Not _me._ "

"Then who?"

"How the hell should I know?"

He struggled, and Irene tutted demurely. "Uh-uh-uh. _Naughty._ Don't try to get up now."

The whip snapped lightly across the heel of her boot in what Coulter couldn't help but feel was a rather pointed fashion.

"Alright! He met some bloke. German guy named Olbrich. But don't bother looking for him. He was out of town before your boy was. No idea where the hell he went."

"Alright," Mycroft said in a measured fashion. "Tell that to me again, and this time _tell me what you_ _know._ "

Coulter's struggles with the ties stilled, and he looked up at Mycroft with a gaze that was suddenly assessing. There was no trace of fear left in his countenance, Irene realised. Slouching back insouciantly against the headboard of the bed, arms slack against their restraints, he grinned. For the first time, Tomas Coulter looked dangerous.

"Well well..." he smirked. "And here I thought you knew everything."

"A patently ludicrous supposition."

Coulter grinned, eyes glinting darkly. A red tongue flickered out and touched his upper lip.

"Didn't you _know_ Ice Man?"

Irene's whip lashed out, snapping viciously against his sock-clad foot. " _What?_ "

Coulter yelled, flinching violently, and drew his feet back hastily beneath him.

"Fucking ow! Can't you rein her in, you English bastard?"

Mycroft smiled thinly. "I shouldn't like to try it."

Irene's mouth made a soft, ironic moue. "Don't sell yourself short, handsome. How do you know until you've tried?"

"I thank you for your confidence," Mycroft said, drily. "But it doesn't answer my question. Tomas?"

Coulter laughed, brashly and without humour. "How badly do you want to know?"

"Allow me to put this as politely as possible, Tomas. You are tied to your own bedstead; you are alone. You have no neighbours close by; no one to hear you scream. And I want to know _quite_ badly."

Coulter's eyes flicked from Mycroft to Irene and back again. His left hand twitched, the knot of the tie fumbled between palm and fingertips. This time, Irene didn't bother with a warning. The whip moved so rapidly that it defied sight, a scarlet weal springing into being across the delicate skin of his exposed wrist. Coulter screamed.

"Tell me."

"Fuck you, Ice Man."

"Tell me."

Another whip crack.

"Tell me."

Coulter snarled, his body rising half off the bed as he surged forward. The knots held. He jerked back against the headboard, slumped and panting. Then, rather to Irene's surprise, he began to laugh. It was a sound without a trace of mirth in it, vicious, vindictive and spite-filled.

"He's alive. Your boy's alive."

Irene frowned in confusion, letting her whip fall to her side.

"Oh, not little brother," Coulter jeered softly. "Though I daresay he's still kicking, for now."

He licked his lips, casting a sly glance at Mycroft.

"Not him. The other one. Your precious Knight. Alive and – probably not very well actually, but what's a little torture between friends?"

Mycroft's jaw had tightened at the mention of Sherlock. "How did you know?"

"That he was your brother?" he bared his teeth in a malicious grin. "Call it family resemblance."

Mycroft's nostrils flared slightly. "I see. And Knight?"

"Ten years in Guantanamo," Coulter said softly. His tongue flicked out again, as if relishing the words. "Ten years in Guantanamo, and you never knew." He chuckled darkly. "And here I thought you'd sent him there."

.

"You left him alive," Irene said musingly. "Why?"

She stood at the window of a shabby safe house, looking down into a narrow, tree-lined street.

Mycroft was at the room's only table. He was in his shirtsleeves, his tie hanging loose about his neck. His eyes were glazed, as if seeing something that wasn't really there. His elbows rested on the table, hands meeting in front of his mouth. Between the fingers of his right hand he held a cigarette, slowly crumbling to ash. A thin trail of smoke peeled away from the tip, twisting in the still air in front of his face.

"Mycroft?"

He roused himself painfully, blinking up at her, and glanced at the long column of built-up ash with an air of vague surprise.

At last, with a great effort, he stirred himself to reach across the table and tap the cigarette into a yellow saucer. The column of ash collapsed into a soft, feather-grey heap.

"Bodies cause questions." Mycroft said, without inflection. "Tomas will wake tomorrow morning with what feels like the world's worst hangover and no memory of tonight's conversation. It's easier that way. Neater."

"Do you think his information was accurate?"

Mycroft hesitated. He slipped the cigarette into his mouth and took a slow draw, only the first she'd seen him take since lighting it. The smoke swirled blue in the cavern of his mouth before he exhaled.

"It confirms a theory."

"The German, Olbrich?"

"Yes."

He looked up at her with sharp, steady eyes.

"I thought that Knight had died eleven years ago. I had all the evidence. I knew who was there, and I knew what was said. Olbrich was one of those tasked with killing him." He drew another breath of smoke, and exhaled. "It now appears that he had a better offer."

"Meaning what?"

Mycroft shrugged elegantly. "A price. Feign Knight's death, make it convincing enough that neither the Germans nor the British come looking for him, and sell him to the Americans. For a price."

"Doesn't anybody stay dead anymore?"

"It would appear that you are a trend-setter in that regard. Congratulations."

He reached across the table again, long-armed, and crushed his cigarette neatly against the rim of the saucer. She marvelled briefly at the movement of his hands, the natural grace that rendered even the most mundane of actions exquisite.

"Why is he important, Mycroft? Why does he matter?"

"It _doesn't_ matter. Not really."

She shook her head, her eyes challenging him. "I don't believe you."

Mycroft shot her a soft, fleeting smile. He raised his arms behind his head and leant back against his clasped hands. He glanced at her, and the light flickered over the planes of his face.

"Because I was wrong."

* * *

Pippa Grey stood in the shadow of a large plane tree and observed the sad expanse of wasteland that passed for playing fields at the state-owned Kelston High School. Two of the pitches were empty – pockmarked turf and abstract patterns of holes from metal-sprigged boots. The third was occupied by a team of rag-tag girls hacking awkwardly at a soccer ball.

Located in the London Borough of Brent, Kelston High School served a jumbled and often itinerant segment of the community. The unemployment rate was high, the wages poor, and the opportunities for advancement almost nil. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the school itself enjoyed one of the highest rates of diversity in Britain. Almost a quarter of the regular attendees were refugees or recent immigrants, while those born in the UK comprised a range of ethnicities usually seen only on glossy, diversity-conscious political brochures. Musingly, Pippa assessed the aspiring footballers. Of the fourteen girls, only seven shared racial heritage with another member of the team: three Pakistani, two Iranian, and two white British.

It wasn't the footballers that Pippa was interested in, however, but their coach – a tall, slim woman with a mass of corkscrew curls fighting their way loose from her ponytail. Pippa had seen Sally Donovan in person only twice, but knew more about her than most of the people Sally called friends. She knew that Sally's father was an optometrist and her mother a vicar in the Church of England; that she was the eldest of five siblings, two male and three female; that she was thirty-four years of age and precisely a month younger than Sherlock Holmes, with whom she had a fierce rivalry and mutual antagonism, not entirely un-tinged with regard; that she liked John Watson, had little time for Molly Hooper, and got on like a house on fire with Martha Hudson; that she remained on friendly terms with Phillip Anderson, though not with Debbie, his wife; that her relationship with Greg Lestrade was both closer and more nebulous than she liked it to appear.

One of the girls made a particularly awkward pass, and Sally jogged to intercept it.

"Easy on the boot there, Keisha!"

"Aw, piss off. It ain't my fault."

"Piss off, yourself!" Sally replied, showing no signs of ill-humour. She collected the ball and passed it neatly back. "Now let's try to get it _in_ the goal, yeah?"

The young girl flipped Sally the finger – not aggressively, just as a sort of vague riposte. She aimed another shot at the goal, this time coming within a couple of inches of the post.

"Hey! That's better! And again, come on."

Amongst other things about her, Pippa knew that Sally Donovan had been coaching the junior girls' soccer team at Kelston High School for six years now. She had taken it on when her own youngest sister had been in the team and their previous coach had absconded without warning. She'd bullied Greg Lestrade into joining her, appealing to his sense of social responsibility and his ego in equal measure. She'd ambushed him in his office one evening after work and informed him that the girls needed a decent male role model in their lives; needed to see that a white man and a black woman could work together and respect each other; most importantly, that women could have and rely upon male friends without being required to supply sex in exchange.

Sally checked her watch and seemed to realise that they were twenty minutes over time. She blew her whistle to summon the girls and they gathered in a jumble of chatter, shoving and shouted insults. Pippa listened with only half her attention to the arrangements for next week's match (who needed to be picked up from home; who had a shift at the supermarket they couldn't get out of; and did anyone know someone who could lend Jordan a pair of boots?).

"When's Greg gonna be back?" a young voice piped up.

"Couple of weeks still."

"He _said_ he'd be there."

"Yeah, well. He's a useless tosser, in'ee? Look, I don't know any more than you do. He's not answering his phone."

"But he _said._ "

"Yeah, I know. Look, I'll make him shout us fish 'n' chips when he gets back. Deal?"

There were cheers at this, and a loud babble of speculation and commentary. Ribbing each other, the girls packed away the balls and nets, untied their boots and began to pack up their bags. A few headed towards the changing rooms, but most had no kit to bother with. Finally they began to disperse, shouting farewells, a few waving at Sally as they left.

There was a dark blue motorbike in the staff carpark beside the playing field. Sally unlocked the storage compartment and retrieved clothes, boots and a helmet. She pulled on the jeans and the heavy kevlar jacket over top of her kit, then seated herself on the edge of the kerb to swap her trainers for snug, low-heeled leather boots.

Pippa slipped from the shadow of the plane tree and walked openly across the carpark. Sally saw her coming and frowned, her brow creased in an expression somewhere between confusion and annoyance.

"Stalking me outside the office now as well?"

Pippa smiled. "I wanted to see how the investigation was getting on."

"The putative investigation into the disappearance of Mycroft Holmes," Sally said sceptically. "And why, exactly did you want _me_ to look for him?"

"Because I want to ensure that everything possible is being done to ensure his safety?" Pippa suggested sweetly. Sally gave an inelegant snort.

"Yeah, right. Listen, if you work for him – and I've seen you with him before, so I'm pretty sure you _do_ work for him – then you know as well as I do that he's not going to be found by the Metropolitan Police. That's if he even _is_ missing, which I doubt."

"Oh, I'm not asking you to _find_ him," Pippa said demurely. "I'm only asking you to _look_ for him."

Sally paused, her boot half-on, and her head cocked to one side. "And on whose account are you looking, exactly?"

A dimple appeared in Pippa's cheek. "Now you're asking the right questions."

Sally sighed. She zipped her boot and stood up, rolling her shoulders. She tossed her trainers into the bike's storage compartment and slammed it shut.

"I'm guessing I'm going to miss _Top Gear_ tonight then."

The dimple widened. "I should think so, yes."

Sally scowled, but her dark eyes looked amused. "You have a name?"

"Several."

She raised an eyebrow. "Well, don't hold out on me."

"Anthea."

"Is that your real name?"

"What do you think?"

Sally groaned. "I think I'm going to need a drink."

.

* * *

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 **A/N:** Thanks so much for all your reviews folks! Keep 'em coming. :-)Next chapter: John's not a secret agent; he's a very naughty boy.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N:** Hello lovely people! My sincere apologies for the lengthy delay between chapters. Sometimes, real life's a bitch. Thanks as always to everyone who's left reviews and encouragement. We pick up the story with our heroes about to set foot on Cuban soil for the first time... And they are not in good moods.

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* * *

Chapter Nine.

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Their final flight was, thankfully, a brief one. The plane was small, only a couple of dozen seats, and they stepped out onto the tarmac at Santiago de Cuba into an almost tropical heat. Once outside the shabby, over-warm terminal the Watsons hailed a taxi, leaving Greg and Molly to experience the delights of Cuban public transport. _En route_ to the hotel, John made the taxi pause outside a tiny hardware store where, in accordance with Mycroft's instructions, he picked up a folding hacksaw.

The downmarket hotel where Mycroft had reserved rooms for them had been chosen for one very specific reason: the rooms on the second floor were laid out in mirror image, arranged in such a way that the closets backed on to each other. Upon arrival, Mary switched on the battered television and selected a loud and obnoxious American music channel. Judging by the audio time lag and accompanying static whine, it was probably being broadcast illegally. Ignoring the pixelated boy-band on screen, John went to work with the hacksaw. Twenty minutes later, they had a nice little communicating door in the back of the closet. John swept up the last of the sawdust, tossed it out the window, and turned the music down to a more manageable volume.

"God, this is so old-school," Mary groaned, collapsing backwards onto the bed.

John frowned. "I thought it was pretty recent."

The music seemed familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. A particularly catchy lyric filtered through the background noise, and John grimaced.

 _'Why are we still so afraid? The things we do deserve their rightful names…'_

(Sherlock Holmes, get out of my fucking head).

"Not the song, dingbat," Mary told him, with all of her customary sensitivity. "This, the whole thing… Hacksaws and phone-taps and fake hairdos. It's insanely old-school. _Espionage_ with a capital 'E'. These days people just buy a bloody safe-house."

John frowned. "Well, Mycroft's on a budget for once in his life. Not much of one, maybe, given he's flown us everywhere from London to Timbuktu, but…"

"I hope that's all it is," Mary said darkly.

"What do you mean?"

"Just that his ideas of what he calls leg-work appear to be the tiniest bit out of date. Like Cold War out of date."

He snorted. "I doubt you even remember the Cold War. You were a bloody kid."

"Maybe, but my handler wasn't. Believe me, I've heard stories."

John stifled the flinch that travelled across his face, but he knew Mary had seen it. She sank back against the headboard, looking suddenly tired.

"When are you going to get over it, John?"

John laughed without humour. "Oh, that's what I have to do, is it? 'Get over it'?"

"If you want this to have any chance of working, yes."

John's jaw tightened, the lines about his mouth suddenly more pronounced. "That wasn't the deal. You agreed. I asked if Mary Watson was good enough for you, and you – you said yes."

"And I would have been fine with that," Mary snapped. " _Fine._ If you want the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids thing, then we can do that. But you don't get to go running round playing secret-agents with Sherlock and then get pissy when I do the same."

"In case you hadn't noticed, Sherlock's _not here_."

Mary sighed. She raised her chin and looked at him intently.

"We're going to get him back, John."

Her eyes were direct and very blue. Something in their glance made John feel exposed.

Unwilling to confront her, he turned away, stooping to release Billie from her portable travel cot. He lowered his daughter tenderly to the floor, where she made a beeline for the still-blaring television. On-screen, a dozen barely-clad women gyrated humiliatingly (and in defiance of Cuban censorship laws) about a pixelated and posturing rapper. Hastily, John reached for the remote and switched the thing off, ignoring Billie's whine of protest.

" _John_ ," Mary said, unwavering. "What are you afraid of?"

It took John a moment to answer. When he did, his voice was low and strained.

"That I don't know you. That I don't know who you are."

Mary made no sign. She didn't run her hand through her hair, or bite her lip, or pinch the bridge of her nose. Mary had no tells.

John had been married to Mary for not-quite two years, and the only guess he had about her was that she might be American because she'd worked for the CIA and didn't take milk in her fucking tea.

Mary tilted her head slightly to one side and looked at him. "How well do you know Sherlock?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"Just tell me. How well?"

John shrugged. "Well enough. Age, weight, shoe size, favourite brand of marmalade. Usual stuff."

"Really? Is that 'usual'?" Mary arched a politely disbelieving eyebrow. "You know those things about all your friends, do you?"

"What?"

Mary gave a dismissive wave. "Doesn't matter. The point is, you know those things about me too."

"Not really, no. Alright, I know that Mary Morstan doesn't like marmalade; but do _you_? Who knows? Maybe Sherlock could work it out, but I never will."

Mary rolled her eyes. "I've never lied to you about my marmalade preferences, John."

"I don't think that's all that much to be proud of, myself."

"Maybe not. But the point is, I'm no different from him. You say you know him, but you know next to nothing about his history. He tells you nothing about his childhood, his family. You didn't even know about their older brother till Mycroft told you."

John shrugged, irritated. "Yeah. And that annoys me. But you know what? It doesn't actually matter all that much because – and this is the crucial difference, here – _I'm not married to him_."

"As if that made me matter any more to you than he does!"

"It _does_."

"How is it any different, John? So you don't know if my parents were Russian or Swedish or Australian. You never knew his either until after he came back."

"Yes," John said coolly. "But I've got to know them rather well since then, as it happens. Something to do with their son being laid out in a hospital with a bullet hole in his chest."

"Aaand we're back to that again!"

Mary was angry now. They didn't talk about it, not really, but it had never entirely gone away. It reared up when they fought, whenever John felt Mary's trustworthiness was in question, but most particularly in arguments about Sherlock. There was an element of stubborn intransigence in John's character that Mary had categorised, privately, as 'wilful blindness'. He refused to discuss or openly acknowledge the things that angered him, yet he couldn't prevent himself from worrying at them, terrier-like, refusing to let go.

That she'd angered him now, she had no doubt. John's face was closed and wrathful, his brows drawn darkly down over his eyes.

"Perhaps if you had told me the truth from the beginning –" he said tightly, still striving for control, and the injustice of it, from a man who had refused to even hear her explanations, hit her hard.

"Really John? Really? Because you would have been _so_ understanding, I'm sure –"

"So maybe that's a risk you should have taken instead of letting our whole marriage be a damned lie!"

"Oh, right, because you've never lied to _me_ before!"

"No I bloody well haven't."

"Oh yeah? And how long did it take you to even _tell_ me about him? Four months of me tiptoeing around like you're some grieving bloody widower…" she feigned sudden recollection, smacking her forehead with the heel of her palm. "Oh, wait, that's _exactly_ what you were. And now we're all back on the bloody merry-go-round because he's up and left you and you can barely function like an adult without him."

She paused, head cocked on one side in mock-concern. "Does it bother you, John? The fact that you need him, and he doesn't need you at all?"

The look on John's face was terrible. He lifted his chin and set his jaw, eyes a sudden, frightening blue.

"I never lied to you," he said. "Not once. And if you can't understand why I didn't want to talk about it, then I don't know why we're even having this conversation."

He grabbed his wallet, phone and room key from the bedside table and jammed them into the pocket of his jeans. He picked up his jacket from the end of the bed and shrugged himself into it with such violence that Mary heard a seam tear. At the door to the hotel room, he stopped and looked back over his shoulder.

"I suppose I shouldn't expect you to empathise," he said. "It's hardly something assassins are known for."

The slam of the door as he kicked it behind him rang loudly in the sudden silence. As the echoes faded, Billie began to cry.

.

* * *

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 **Up next:** In which Mary is left holding the baby, and John goes looking for trouble...


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter Ten.

.

After John had left, Billie took an age to settle. She couldn't be distracted by food, and refused to sleep, and had lost interest in most of the toys they'd packed somewhere around about Monaco. Ideally, Mary could've taken her outside for a breath of fresh air and hopefully tired her out, but Mycroft's instructions had been firm on that point. They were in a foreign country with no back up and a bunch of unknown hostiles who were likely to be on the lookout for Sherlock-related activity. On top of that, Greg and Molly were running twenty minutes late for their rendezvous, and Mycroft was God-knew-where doing God-knew-what to God-knew-whom.

And the fact that John had chosen to ignore all this and storm out in a huff, frankly, pissed Mary right off.

Irritably, Mary ground her teeth, thinking evil thoughts about her wailing daughter that would probably be sufficient grounds for committal were she to voice them in public. John's discipline was fine as long as there was someone watching him, but the minute he was left to his own devices he turned into a bloody maverick. The British Army had a lot to answer for.

Finally, in desperation, Mary turned out John's suitcase in search of something her daughter might consider novel. Under usual circumstances she would've had no problem going through John's things, but in the wake of their argument she was left feeling unreasonably guilty. The discovery that John had somehow managed to pack Sherlock's e-reader, a pair of his underpants, and the brand of toothpaste that they used at Baker Street did not improve her mood.

The pickings were less than she might've liked, but eventually she unearthed a chewed-looking board book about a honey bee and an international plug converter that appeared, for some unfathomable reason, to suit Billie's current humour. Mercifully, the provision of these offerings had the effect of lowering the decibel level to a manageable state, and thereafter Billie gnawed on the plug converter in reasonable contentment while Mary delved into the fascinating narrative of Buzzy Bella's Big Day.

.

Greg and Molly arrived quarter of an hour later, much to Mary's relief. She kept quiet as she heard them chatting to the concierge outside in the hallway, Molly in a sort of mumbled high school Spanish, and Greg with a surprisingly credible mid-western accent. She heard the jangle of keys as the door was opened, mumbled pleasantries, the heavy thump of bags hitting the floor, and the rhythmic clatter of footsteps down the carpeted hallway as the concierge retreated. Mary flicked back to the beginning of the book and started telling Billie, for the sixth time, that Buzzy Bella lived in a hive. Before she'd counted five minutes, there was a gentle scuffling in the wardrobe, and Greg's tousled head poked out from between the doors.

"Thank God we got the right room!" he said, grinning. "I was terrified we'd fuck it up and have to tell Mycroft we'd lost you."

He stepped out of the wardrobe and made a beeline for the bed, collapsing back onto it with a whump of exhaled breath. He groaned dramatically. "I never want to see another bus in my life."

"It wasn't that bad," Molly said, stepping through the wardrobe behind him. "Though if another dirty old man tries to grope my bum on the street, I'm going to be seriously cross."

Billie, having spotted her favourite person, tossed the plug converter ungratefully into her mother's lap and scrambled rapidly towards the bed. She grasped Greg about the knee and hauled herself halfway into his lap.

"Up!"

Greg groaned. "Not now, sunshine. Uncle Greg's dying. He's run up the curtain and joined the choir invisible."

"Up!"

"Mmff." But he dragged himself into a sitting position and reached down for her, swinging her up onto his belly. Energy exhausted by this endeavour, he collapsed backwards, covering his eyes with a hairy forearm.

"It _wasn't_ that bad," Molly reiterated, settling herself in one of the armchairs. "He's just being a drama queen." Greg gave a pitiful-sounding whine.

"Where's John?" Molly asked, glancing around the room as if she expected him to emerge, cloaked and masked, from the woodwork.

"Out throwing a tanty," Mary said, tartly.

Molly gave her an awkward sort of smile. "He's missing Sherlock."

"I know, I know…"

"Mycroft's not going to be happy if he's gone out though, is he?"

"No. No he's not. But I suppose he'll just have to put up with it. Either John'll come home tonight with his tail between his legs, or he won't. There's not much we can do about it now."

A grunting snore from the direction of the bed informed them that Greg had fallen asleep. He lay where he'd fallen, his legs still dangling off the edge of the bed. Billie lay atop his chest, her face mashed into his shirt and her mouth open in a matching snore.

"I wish I knew how he did it," Mary grumbled. "Six hours I've been trying to get her to sleep, but oh no, I'm just her mother; – then his Sainted Gregness walks in and she's out like a light."

"Cheer up. At least she _is_ out."

Mary gave her a tight smile in answer. She tried not to resent it, she really did, but it frustrated her at times that both her daughter and her husband were so obviously partisan. There was no doubting where Billie got her loyalty.

* * *

The night air was warm and balmy, and John breathed deeply, rounding his shoulders back and feeling the pull of muscles in his chest. A breeze was blowing up the hill towards him from the dock, each warm billow filling his lungs with the tang of salt. A skinny dog lay at full stretch in a gutter, heavy paws crossed in front of it, surrounded by polystyrene shreds of old takeaway cartons. The dog watched, unblinking, as he passed, its eyes almost vulpine in their cunning.

Once the angry adrenaline that had spurred him out of the hotel had faded, John had been discrete. He'd slipped in and out of the few shabby stores, sometimes without buying, sometimes with a few innocuous purchases. A second-hand backpack with sturdy straps; a handful of snack bars; a pre-packed first aid kit from which, to John's eye, approximately 20% of the original contents had been carefully skimmed by the proprietor. He'd been seriously tempted by a sawn-off shotgun – openly available from a dingy workshop that went by the name of a mechanic's – but had settled instead for a solid and well-hinged flick-knife. At an all-night café he picked up half a dozen sandwiches and, from a stand-up bar in the middle of the main street – the only business conducting anything that could remotely be called brisk trade – a bottle of cheap bourbon.

It took him half an hour to find what he was looking for. His wandering might have appeared aimless to the casual observer, hands pocketed and hood pulled low over his forehead. He'd tried for the docks at first, then worked systematically backwards, paying particular attention to the lees of doorways and the shadows beneath bridges. He'd encountered the usual jumble of tramps and beggars: prostitutes of every stripe; hard, muscled youths who challenged him with jutted chins and squinted eyes, high on testosterone and anything else that was readily obtainable; scrawny old winos who peered at him through cataract-bleared eyes.

Finally, in a narrow back-street a couple of blocks from the hotel, he found them. Four boys and a girl of varying ages, squatting openly on the pavement around a brazen and smoky campfire, the chief component of which appeared to be old tyres. He met the eye of one – a slim, brown, bright-eyed boy with shaggy curls. The boy, sensing a tourist, held out cupped hands, abject expression sliding quickly into place.

Slowly, careful not to alarm them, John swung the backpack off one shoulder and retrieved the parcel of sandwiches. Five small bodies straightened, five pairs of dark eyes widening comically. Unhurriedly, John held the parcel aloft.

"Anyone speak English?" He asked pointedly.

The children relaxed immediately, expressions rearranging themselves into ones of shrewd expectation. It was clear that this was a business transaction.

"English, yes." It was the girl who spoke, her voice heavily accented but intelligible. "You have money, guero?"

"Some," John admitted, lowering himself to the edge of the kerb. He opened the parcel of sandwiches and passed them around, the children accepting them promptly and without platitudes.

"First off, are any of you hurt?" he pulled the first aid kit from the backpack, displaying the peeling red cross. "I'm a doctor, ok? Doctor – _Medico_."

The children shook their heads, looking vaguely alarmed – all except the smallest boy, who nodded emphatically, eyes gleaming, and rolled up the hem of his baggy shorts to indicate a skinned knee. It was scabbed over and half-healed already, but John good-naturedly produced a band-aid from his kit and stuck it solemnly into place. The little boy grinned, holding his knee aloft and twisting it left and right in order to assess John's handiwork. John grinned back. He only wished he'd thought to buy the sort decorated with cartoon characters.

"I'm looking for a friend of mine," John said, addressing himself to the girl. "Maybe you've seen him."

John drew his phone from his pocket and paged through until he found the photograph of Sherlock on the couch. He passed it round the circle, watching the children's eyes carefully for any sign. Unexpectedly, the girl giggled.

"Pretty," she told him. The tip of her tongue poked playfully from between two rows of perfect pearly teeth. "Pretty friend."

John gave a huff of laugher. "So you noticed too, huh? Too pretty for his own good, some might say."

The kids grinned conspiratorially, though it was patently obvious that none of them understood a word.

"Can you help me?" John asked. He indicated the photo again. "Lost. My friend is lost."

There was a flood of rapid Spanish of which the only word John recognised was 'amigo'. He assumed that the girl was translating for him.

"No see him," she said, turning back to John with a shrug. She indicated the boys.

John wasn't overly disappointed. He'd expected that.

"Can you tell me?" he asked. "Tell me if you see him? I will come again tomorrow."

"Ok, _guero_."

"Thanks," John said, meaning it. He withdrew a handful of snack bars from his pack and handed them out, thankful that the bourbon, on this occasion, was likely to prove unnecessary. " _Gracias_."

The girl waved him away with an airy hand. "Come tomorrow." And then, slyly, with her chin ducked in the direction of the youngest boy: "Ernesto likes chips."

The youngest boy beamed widely.

John laughed aloud. "Tomorrow," he promised, waving.

.

For the next three hours, John traversed the town. He paced the streets, feeling their heartbeat; taking their measure the way he'd often done with Sherlock. In the early days, Sherlock had frequently set him tasks, getting him to memorise the ever-shifting sequence of roadworks or identify every entrance to a building at a glance, to spot a dozen members of the homeless network before they spotted him, or to notice who was missing from their favourite hangout. So far as John could remember he'd never merited full marks, and seldom even Sherlock's taciturn grunt of approval. Still, he hadn't been awful at it. There had been occasions, a very few, when Sherlock had turned and grabbed his shoulder, treating John to the full force of his bright eyes, his brilliant, megawatt smile (' _Good, John! Really. Of course, you missed the drycleaner's and the place we went to for dumplings last week, but you remembered almost everything of importance…'_ ).

So for three hours, John walked the streets, hunting out the places where the children gathered and noting them down in his mental street map. He slipped in quietly wherever he felt he could do so unobserved, passing around the photo of Sherlock, and watching their eyes. He'd deliberately chosen the children, rather than the adults. Adults were cagier, more inclined to suspicion, and frankly, often too steeped in miscellaneous substances to make a great deal of sense. They took time to win over that John didn't have. Kids, by contrast, had always seemed to love him, and he'd never met one yet who didn't delight in conspiracy.

Most of those he questioned just shook their heads, passing the phone back with shy, disarming smiles, and – in the case of the older girls – a lot of giggling over Sherlock's looks. This last honestly surprised John. Intellectually, he knew that Sherlock's odd features came together in a way that was – surprisingly – attractive. But to John it was a minor detail. Sherlock was Sherlock: phenomenal, brilliant, good at everything – it only made sense that he'd be handsome as well. It didn't make him any better at guessing Agatha Christie plots or washing his own pants.

Perhaps half a dozen of the kids he encountered thought that Sherlock looked familiar. Two said that 'maybe' they'd seen him about. It wasn't much to go on, but John had confidence in his methods. Sherlock was brilliant, but he wasn't omnipotent. Somewhere along the way, he'd have needed help from someone, and John was laying odds that he'd have chosen a child. It wasn't especially ethical, and nor was it the sort of thing that a responsible adult would contemplate – but as an argument, that practically spoke for itself.

The first road sign to Guantanamo came as a shock.

He'd known they were in the vicinity, obviously, but he hadn't realised how close they really were. The name sent a shiver down his spine. John had seen and done some pretty distasteful things in his time, but nothing, _nothing_ he'd seen had been like the stories that came out of that place. Phrases from headlines flitted through his brain. _Hunger strikes… ritual humiliation… state-sanctioned torture…_ And these were the people that Sherlock had chosen to get himself entangled with.

You could say this for his idiot best friend, he never did things by half measures.

John glanced swiftly over his shoulder. Nothing he'd seen tonight had caused him concern, but the last thing he wanted to do was to draw attention to himself. He took the next left turn he found to take him back up the hill, away from the threatening sign. Carefully, quietly, he made his way back towards the commercial streets, navigating via the thrum of traffic. Hidden in the pocket of his jeans, his left hand grasped the flick-knife.

By the time he was a few blocks from the hotel, he had started to breathe more easily. He found himself in a well-lit street full of bars and guesthouses and eateries. A woman was cooking something at a brazier; a child tipped a pail of slops into an overflowing bin; an old man with a cigarette clamped between his teeth tuned a guitar. Outside a run-down nightclub two tall men, one black and one white, sat on stools, with a barrel between them as a table. They were playing cards, taking shots from a bottle of absinthe when they lost a hand. Something about them made the back of John's neck prickle uneasily.

He watched a moment too long. The white man looked up and caught John looking at them. John dropped his head quickly, but not before he'd had time to realise what was niggling at his subconscious: straight posture, short-cropped hair, hard eyes. Soldiers. They weren't in uniform, but that was hardly reassuring. A soldier not in uniform, in John's experience, was either a thug, or a spy.

The white man said something to his companion, who dropped his cards and looked up. He half-stood, and John caught the dark shape of a holster at his belt.

A lorry was making its way up the street, and John took his chance. He ducked casually behind it, hoping that the two men would lose interest. From the cover of the lorry, he nipped into a shadowed alcove beneath an awning and chanced a look back.

What he saw was not reassuring. The men had left their table, cards and absinthe lying abandoned. They were making their way steadily in his direction, not hurrying, but moving with the full assurance of men who were not used to asking twice.

 _Shit, shit, shit._ Two men, both trained by the looks of it, both of them armed. Contrary to the view perpetuated by comic books, two against one was not good odds. It was even less good odds when the one in question happened to be a 37-year-old doctor on the wrong side of five-foot-eight. Even if Sherlock had been there, the best they could manage between them was about five people trying to kill them at a time. Any more than that, and they were usually in line for a short, sharp pasting.

Still hopeful that they hadn't spotted him, John slipped out from under the awning and dodged into a side-street. There were fewer people here, which was both good and bad. On the one hand, fewer people meant less chance of intervention, but on the other, it also meant less chance of drawing attention to himself, and drawing attention was just what John didn't want to do. He turned out of the side-street into a public square. It was cold, grey, and deserted.

Any hope that their pursuit of him could have been a coincidence faded when the two men turned into the square after him. They were still walking in that purposeful, unhurried way. John stood his ground, feet planted, hands in the pockets of his jeans.

"Problem, gents?"

The two soldiers exchanged a glance, and the taller guy nodded.

Without warning, they swung for him.

John had been expecting it. He ducked the first blow, the second catching him a glancing strike to the upper arm. He got a fist into the black guy's ribs, but he barely stumbled, and meanwhile the white guy had caught a handful of John's sweatshirt and was tugging him off balance. John swung an elbow into his gut, and the man swore, but didn't release his hold.

"No need to get feisty, little man. We just want a chat."

Oh yeah, because a line like _that_ had never been followed by three weeks of water torture in a darkened room.

Neither of his opponents had drawn a gun yet, and John didn't want to give them the opportunity. He pulled the flick knife from his pocket and, instead of opening it, brought it down on the black guy's head. There was a satisfying crack, and the man snarled, but – much to John's irritation – didn't drop. Why was it only in movies that bad guys had skulls made of crêpe paper?

The white guy had used John's distraction to improve his hold, and now he had an arm beneath each of John's, hauling him backwards. John threshed and writhed, swinging his elbows into the man's stomach and the haft of the knife towards his groin. The man flinched, but didn't let go, and in the meantime, his mate was reaching for his holster.

 _Oh, no. No, no, no._ John was not having that.

Using a trick he'd learnt from Sherlock, he abandoned his attack on the guy behind him and grasped him by the back of the neck instead. Tightening his abdomen, he used his captor for leverage and swung his feet up, catching the other soldier neatly beneath the chin. This time, the black guy went down, his head snapping back and his knees giving way as the weapon in his hand went flying. He wasn't out, not by any means, but he wouldn't be getting his hands on his gun in a hurry, and that was what counted.

Staggering suddenly under John's unexpected weight (all 72 kilos of it), the white guy buckled. John finished it off by stamping hard on the bloke's instep as he came back down. His captor stumbled, tripping over John's foot in a rather painful fashion, and at last loosened his hold. With a neat blow from the knife haft to the man's sensitive bits, John tore himself away.

He didn't stay around long enough to assess the damage; he bolted, taking off down the street back towards the main thoroughfare.

Six blocks away, he stumbled to a halt. His knuckles were bleeding and his instep throbbed where his assailant had tripped over it.

But what disturbed him most of all was that, before they'd followed him into the square, he'd distinctly heard one of the soldiers use the name "Watson."

.

* * *

.

 **A/N:** Whew! Pretty long one today, but hopefully it'll make up for the brevity of last week's chapter. Thanks to the lovely Analena, who left me a review for it anyway. :-) Up next: John's just been beaten up, Mary's in a mood, and Greg and Molly are stuck sharing a hotel room...


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven.

.

It was past midnight by the time John made it back to the hotel. He cleaned the blood from his knuckles in the bathroom off the lobby, hoping to avoid telling Mary about his little adventure for the time being. She'd skin him alive.

Their room was dark when he slipped inside, though a bar of pale moonlight filtered through the curtains and laid a long stripe across the floor. He paused for a heartbeat beside Billie's travel cot, where she lay with her face turned sideways, arms crooked and hands in loose fists on the pillow beside her head. He reached down and touched the tawny hair, flaxen-pale in the moonlight.

The bed dipped beneath his weight as he lay down, and Mary stirred, but did not turn to face him. John's knee nudged against the back of hers and she stiffened.

"Oh, so you are still alive then."

John reached out across the intervening space and laid a hand against her shoulder blade. Her back was rigid beneath his palm.

"I'm sorry," he murmured.

"Got your little tanty out of the way?" Mary sneered. Her muscles tensed aggressively. John closed his eyes, pressing his thumb and fingertips against their lids.

"I'm sorry," he repeated.

Mary said nothing, but the tension of her shoulders relaxed infinitesimally. John raised his hand to the nape of her neck and threaded his fingers gently through her hair.

Mary exhaled, her hand slipping back to touch his hip bone.

"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry too."

Capitulating, she rolled over to face him. John's hand slid with her as she turned, until it was laying against the side of her neck, the pad of his thumb brushing her ear.

John chuckled quietly.

"Can we just agree that jetlag's a bitch and leave it at that?"

"It'll do till morning," Mary agreed. She leaned over and kissed him; softly at first, but then, when he didn't draw back, with a little more intent.

"Not exactly going to help with regaining a normal sleeping pattern," John mumbled.

"I _really_ don't care."

It seemed like ages since they'd done this. Gently, John slid his hands down to Mary's waist and braced his forearms. With an easy twist, he rolled them, coming to rest with his knees either side of her hips. He lowered his head to kiss her and Mary arched up towards him, a soft noise of contentment escaping her.

People who knew them might have been surprised to learn that, where sex was concerned, John usually took the more dominant role; Mary, competent and commanding, was by mutual consent the decision maker and managing director in their external life. By and large, John was used to the harassment this provoked from friends and acquaintances – suggestions of being under the thumb, held by the balls, or (his personal least-favourite) 'pussy-whipped'. It was worse by far than it had ever been when he was tailing around after Sherlock, and he couldn't help but see it as a double-standard.

For whatever reason though, John usually took charge in the bedroom. Mary liked allowing him to set the pace, enjoyed the freedom that came with not having to call the shots. He didn't know why it worked that way – it just did. He knew that that minor detail would be a topic for fascinated scrutiny by many of his friends, and it annoyed him. It was what it was. People could over-analyse things.

Tonight, his chosen approach was slow and sweet. He was ashamed to think of how little attention he'd paid his wife recently. She was so sharp, so bold, so much more clever than he was that it was easy to forget, sometimes, that she could be fragile too. _Like Sherlock,_ the thought flitted across his mind, and he winced internally. He did _not_ want to think about Sherlock, right at this moment.

Mary was warm and pliant beneath him, her earlier tension melted away. She leaned up on her elbows to kiss him, a teasing light in her eyes.

With ineffable timing, their daughter began to cry.

John stilled, his forehead resting gently against Mary's. For a moment, they lay quiet, weighing the intensity of the interruption, attempting to judge whether Billie might cry herself out or snuffle back to sleep. When no such downturn appeared likely, John sighed and rolled himself upright.

"I'll go," he said.

* * *

Billie, it transpired, was in full-on tantrum mode. Despite the fact that it was nearing one in the morning, John couldn't find it in himself to blame her. The last few days had been hectic and John didn't feel he'd set much of an example given his own less-than-stellar behaviour. _He_ hadn't even had the excuse of teething.

After shuffling back into his jeans, John had walked up and down the corridor for awhile with Billie clinging, monkey-like, to his torso and lashing her sharp heels into his groin. After the first five minutes the screams had decreased a little in volume, but not in frequency. In the interest of other guests, he'd opted for the hotel bar.

Late though it was, there were half a dozen people sitting at scattered tables, eating and talking quietly, and a few more propping up the bar. Many of them were foreigners of some description, John was pleased to note; it meant that he and Billie didn't stick out too obviously.

Luck appeared to be on his side, as the bar was staffed by a pretty, round-faced woman somewhere in her mid-twenties. Some shameless flirting and a little tactical manoeuvring to allow her to catch sight of Billie's flushed and tear-streaked face was sufficient to charm the woman into providing a mug of warmed milk ('Not exactly on the menu, but there's usually some in the staff fridge…'). Foreseeing a long and arduous night ahead, John ordered a pint of lager for himself and then, on the realisation that he'd missed dinner, a hamburger and chips. He made sure to tip the bartender heavily, earning himself a warm smile and a promise to see about Billie's milk with all speed.

John turned away to find himself a table, and was more than a little surprised to notice the back of a familiar grey head leaning against the far wall.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, plonking himself down opposite. Greg looked up with a start of surprise, the beer in his glass sloshing dangerously.

"Drowning my sorrows in wine and women, obviously. What're you doing?"

John hefted Billie in his arms and she gave a pitiful snuffle. John raised his eyebrows meaningfully.

"Ah, of course. Say no more." Greg cocked his head to one side and held out his arms. "Want to cuddle with Uncle Greg, sweetheart?"

Displaying a stubborn perversity of character that was rather reminiscent of Sherlock, Billie screamed fiercely and buried her face in John's shoulder.

John gave an awkward half-shrug with his unencumbered arm. "Guess even you can't win 'em all."

At that moment, mercifully, the bartender reappeared, armed with a resilient-looking plastic mug and a handful of miniature foil-wrapped biscuits.

"You're an angel," John told her fervently. Placing the mug strategically out of reach of Billie's flailing arms, he tore open a packet with his teeth and relinquished the biscuit into her small, sticky hand. The biscuit was satisfyingly hard, and Billie gummed it viciously, half undecided whether to chew or cry. Watching her, the bartender's face broke into an expression of delight, and she favoured John with a flirty smile.

"I'll have your dinner out in a moment."

"An angel," John repeated ardently. "An archangel, a cherubim, a seraph…"

The bartender giggled as she walked away. Greg shook his head in disgust.

"You, John Watson, are a shameless hussy."

John grinned.

"Not gonna deny it," he said. "Seriously though, what are you doing down here?"

Greg turned his face down towards his pint glass, looking suddenly shifty.

"What?"

Greg huffed out an embarrassed-sounding breath. "Honestly? Waiting down here till I can be reasonably sure that Molly's asleep. Would you believe that that sod of a Mycroft only booked us a double room?"

John snorted into his beer.

"I'm sorry, are you trying to tell me that there's a pretty girl alone in a double bed upstairs – who incidentally is practically begging you to ask her out – and you're sitting in the bar like a muppet playing the _parfit gentil knight_?"

"Shuddup." Greg balled up a paper napkin and tossed it at him. It bounced off John's head and fell back onto the table.

"Seriously, what's the deal with you two?" John asked. Greg winced and took a short pull of his beer.

"Would _you_ sleep with Molly, John?"

The bluntness of the question took John aback. Frankly, the honest answer was no. He loved Molly and felt more than a little protective of her, but he'd seen too many of her infatuations flicker and die to seriously think it was a good idea. He hesitated, sensing that it would be impolitic to tell Greg as much. Greg seemed to have read his answer in the hesitation, however.

"Exactly. You wouldn't. And you wouldn't because she's still a bloody kid."

"She's grown up a bit recently," John said, fairly. He ducked inattentively in order to avoid a small fist full of semi-masticated biscuit. He liberated the remnants from Billie's grasp with the aid of a napkin and offered her the milk instead.

"I know," Greg sighed. "And she's cute and smart and funny and all the rest of it. It's not like I don't like her, 'cause I do. But the bottom line is I'm too old for her. And I don't have the faintest idea in hell how I'm supposed to tell _her_ that."

"Um..." John said meditatively. "You sure it's not worth a go? You're not _that_ much older than her."

"It's a bloody decade, John. That's too old."

John shrugged. "Hey, if she's more than half-your-age plus seven..."

Greg threw another napkin at him. "Pervert."

"How can I possibly be a pervert? I'm a doctor. Look, I've got a kid and everything."

Greg threw John a dirty look, but by then their friendly bartender had reappeared; by tacit understanding the discussion was suspended until she had off-loaded John's dinner, brought Greg another pint and pinched Billie's cheeks dotingly. When the woman was safely back behind the bar, John started up again:

"Seriously, what harm can it do to try? So what if she's a bit younger? She's cute. She likes you. You like her." He paused to douse a handful of chips in tomato sauce. "Also, you haven't had any in _forever._ "

Greg choked on his beer.

"What? You haven't. Unless of course there's something you haven't been telling me…?"

Greg frowned, reaching across the table to steal a couple of John's chips.

"No," he said. "You're right, obviously. But it's not –"

"What?"

"It's not – _Jesus, I can't believe I'm telling you this_ –" He drew a deep breath. "Look, there hasn't been anyone, ok? Not since Annie."

John gaped at him. Greg ducked his head uncomfortably and ran a hand through his hair.

"Yeah, you heard me. And I – Hell, it's been so long that I don't even know how to go about changing it."

John stared.

"Yeah, might want to close your mouth now John."

"Sorry." John coughed awkwardly. "Didn't you, um… didn't you get together when you were about eighteen?"

"Nineteen, but yeah."

"And you have honest-to-god never slept with another person since?"

Greg scowled at him. "You _did_ get married didn't you? What did you think the bit about _'forsaking all others'_ meant?"

"Well yeah… But I wasn't nineteen at the time!"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it. ' _Real_ blokes don't give up sleeping round'. Well, too bad. I did." It didn't take a genius to hear the defensiveness in his tone.

"Wow. That's… wow."

Greg glowered.

"No, I don't mean it like that. It's commendable. _Really._ I'm not going to take the piss out of you for being a decent human being. But I mean… Why not after? You've been divorced four years!"

Greg dropped his eyes, the defensiveness fading into a sort of sheepish awkwardness.

"Didn't know where to start, did I?" He drew another deep breath.

"Thing is... Christ, it seems stupid to say it… But I was in love with her." He took a pull of his beer and continued quietly:

"I just never thought there'd be a time when I didn't have that any more."

John couldn't think what to say.

"Took me bloody ages to get over it."

John looked up at him awkwardly. "I didn't know."

"Yeah, well... You didn't exactly have it easy at the time, didja?"

John frowned. "I still should have noticed."

Greg waved a hand, dismissing it. John wasn't happy, but he let it drop. For something to do, he took a bite of his hamburger and was surprised to find that it was excellent. Billie whinged and he bounced her awkwardly, one-handed.

"I still think you need to get some," he said, half-apoologetically. Greg snorted.

"Yeah, you're probably right."

"So why _not_ Molly?" John persisted. As far as he could tell, they'd be good for one another. Greg had the stability Molly needed, and her gentle kindness would be good for his bruised ego. Added to that, Molly was plainly smitten with him, and John had noticed Greg checking _her_ out on more than one occasion.

Greg hesitated, swirling his beer idly with one hand.

"I can't shake the feeling that she sees me as a bit of a father-figure."

John's eyebrows shot upwards into his hairline. "What, really?"

"Maybe. I dunno." Greg shrugged. "And then, she probably wants kids and I really don't know if I can go through all that again."

"Make up your mind. Either she sees you as a father stand-in or a potential baby-daddy. Which is it?"

Greg flicked beer at him. "You're not taking this seriously."

"What's to take seriously? You don't have to end up married. Just try it for awhile and see if it works out."

Greg looked unconvinced.

"Unless there's someone else…?"

"What? No. There's no one else."

They lapsed into silence for awhile. It wasn't all that uncomfortable. They'd been friends too long for that. Awkward conversations were par for the course, just something that had to be got through. It helped that neither of them had ever been particularly macho.

It had been Greg who had picked John up again, after Sherlock had jumped. It had been Greg who'd listened and watched, picked him up and kept him on his feet. John owed him a debt of gratitude for that, one he hadn't forgotten.

"Donovan's got her Inspector's exam tomorrow," Greg said, apropos of nothing.

John frowned. "So…?"

"So nothing. I just feel a bit shit about not being there, that's all. I said I'd help her practise. Now I can't even send a text."

"Yeah, that is a bit shit," John agreed, because it seemed to demand some sort of response.

.

He'd been so jealous of Lestrade and Donovan, after Sherlock had jumped.

It had crept upon him slowly, over that first horrific year. In the beginning, everyone had been too shell-shocked, too raw to think much of anything. There had been enquiries and suspensions and venomous tabloid exposés, glassware shattered and fists driven through walls. Lestrade had made no secret of his fury at Donovan, and John had been only too happy to join him in blaming her.

Over time though, somehow, things had changed. Donovan had apologised, genuinely, and Lestrade, although he'd rebuffed her initial overtures, had softened. John, listless and purposeless, sleeping on Greg's couch every other night, had found himself occasionally in their company. To begin with, Lestrade had been hurt and cold, wary and standoffish in his anger. But one day, Donovan had brought him a cup of coffee, and Lestrade had taken it without thought, without even glancing at it, an easy and familiar gesture. And John had been sickened by the force of his own grief, half-terrified by the weight of his jealousy.

He'd started noticing it after that: little things, the things they shared. Whenever they drove anywhere, Donovan would head automatically for the passenger side door. Lestrade would drive and Donovan would navigate, and they would shout at one another and bicker over her directions. Whenever they left the yard, Lestrade would shrug on his coat while retrieving Donovan's from its hook, and she would grab it at a run as she went past. When Lestrade made damning, smartarse comments to the press, Donovan would rein him in. When Donovan threw spiteful remarks that cut too close to the bone, Lestrade would lay a hand on her shoulder in warning. When they entered a pub together, Lestrade would order two pints without needing to ask. When Donovan slipped out of the office for her lunch break she always returned with an extra sandwich or a pastry in the pocket of her coat; a symbiosis as natural and as easy as breathing.

And John had watched them, so envious that he felt like he could choke.

* * *

Sherlock Holmes loosened the tourniquet about his bicep and lowered his forearm, wriggling his fingers to get the circulation going. There was a tiny bead of blood welling from the injection site, and he pressed two fingers into the crook of his arm to quell it. He stood smoothly, his characteristic grace unimpeded, and went about gathering his paraphernalia. With precision, he snapped the needle in half and wrapped the pieces carefully in toilet paper. The disposable syringe he slipped back into its waxed paper sheath, and the bag of powder he sealed and slipped into an interior pocket of his backpack. Everything else went into the bin. Unhurriedly, he walked back across the room and perched himself on the headrest of the armchair, his large, bare feet on the seat cushion and his elbows on his knees. Then he steepled his hands against his mouth, and waited for clarity.

.

* * *

.

 **A/N:** I blame the last paragraph on Analena, who wanted to know when Sherlock was going to make an appearance. My grateful thanks to her and to aficionada-de-libros for their kind reviews. Next up: in which Molly doesn't entirely agree with Greg's analysis of their situation, and the author finally manages to get most of her heroes into the same room. Hurrah!


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve.

.

Molly woke to the warmth of the sun against her eyelids and the warmth of a human body at her back. The sensation was a novel one. Her last boyfriend, a primary school teacher named Eddie, had dropped out of the picture several months ago.

Cautiously, Molly rolled over, putting a little distance between herself and the sleeping body. Greg was on his back, a long arm flung up behind his head and his face turned sideways, half-squashed against his triceps. She hadn't heard him come in. When she'd mentioned bed he'd muttered something about wanting a drink first, and hadn't returned until after she was asleep.

She wasn't sure how to feel about that.

Greg hadn't made any concessions to sleep beyond the necessary. He wore an old t-shirt and a pair of cotton boxers and had pulled a blanket half over him, but he hadn't bothered to get beneath the sheets. Even the blanket seemed a cursory gesture at best – it was bunched about his waist, covering him from the lower ribs to just below his groin.

There was a familiar fluttery sensation in Molly's belly as she looked at him.

She liked Greg. She had liked him for a while now. He was different from the sorts of boys she usually dated.

For one thing, he was a lot bigger. He was tall, obviously, but also, lying beside her like this, startlingly _solid_. His torso was heavy, with a deep, barrel chest and a bit of softness around the belly. He had very broad shoulders.

Molly looked at him, seeing the things that she'd never had the chance to see before. The hair that peeked from above the collar of his shirt was wiry grey, threaded with black; but the tuft that was visible in the crook of his raised arm was fine and silky, still mostly dark.

The key difference, Molly realised, was that she had been dating _boys_. Even Jim had been boyish: lithe figure and perfectly-shaped eyebrows and dimpled smile. Greg, by contrast, was a grown man.

Perhaps it was time she made the jump.

Greg stirred, and Molly looked hastily away, not wanting to be caught staring. It was a bit pervy, she thought, guiltily, but it was the sort of opportunity that was too good to ignore.

She'd first started wondering if there not might be something there when she was still engaged to Tom. There had been an uncharacteristic awkwardness in Greg's stance, a strange inflection in his voice when he'd asked her if it was serious. And then, at John's wedding they'd been seated beside each other, and Molly had felt terrible, knowing he was watching, painfully aware that he hadn't brought a date of his own. But then, of course, had come the horrible last fight with Tom; the realisation that, in the eyes of everyone she knew, she'd been seeking only a kinder, more domesticated version of Sherlock. Tom himself had told her as much, towards the end.

So now, Molly was stuck. She _wanted_ to like Greg for himself; she was convinced, in fact, that she did. But Greg, as far as she could make out, didn't see it that way. And hadn't she deluded herself this way before? Was she seeing him as he really was, or was she seeing only the glamour of his profession, a merit gained by some subliminal association? She didn't have the answer.

She shifted injudiciously, jostling her bedfellow, and Greg stirred into wakefulness.

If Molly had been hoping for a conversation on the subject, she was disappointed. Greg blinked awake and stretched, hands curling and uncurling luxuriously. Then he rolled his head sideways, and caught sight of Molly. His startled face informed her in no uncertain terms that he hadn't expected to find himself in bed with her, and _certainly_ hadn't expected to find her looking back at him when he did. He gave her a quick, awkward smile and rolled off the bed onto his feet. With what Molly considered to be unwarranted haste, he beat a shambling retreat towards the bathroom.

For a few minutes, Molly lay still, her gaze switching between the window, the ceiling, and the rumpled pillow where Greg had lain. She heard the shower start up and, over the groaning of the pipes, the toilet flushing,

She didn't know what she was doing wrong.

* * *

After a disappointing breakfast of stale cornflakes and lukewarm coffee, they had gathered once again in the Watsons' room. Everyone was edgy, strung out from trying to remember to keep their voices low, to keep themselves in character, not to indicate that they knew each other anywhere outside of their rooms. John and Greg quietly refrained from telling Mary that they'd already smashed that particular rule to smithereens.

Mycroft and Irene were due to arrive at eight o'clock that evening.

John didn't know what to think about the prospect of seeing Irene again. The last time he'd seen her, she'd been curled like a child in his own armchair, with Sherlock's blue dressing gown wrapped tight about her torso. She had sat with her knees folded to her chest, engrossed and utterly still, staring in undisguised fascination at the man who sat opposite her.

In a strange reversal of the norm, John had been struck by his own _otherness,_ his lack of fit. In a world containing two such creatures, it was he, John Watson, who didn't belong. John didn't trust her – that was the bottom line. Not as far as he could throw her. And he had been forced into the realisation that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do about it. If Sherlock wanted Irene, he would have her; would follow her, hook, line and sinker; and there was nothing John could do to stop him.

She'd worn Sherlock's blue dressing gown. She'd had long, artless, still-damp hair and a soft, naked mouth. Her eyes had snapped at him, fierce and sharp and proud and vulnerable, and so like Sherlock.

And then she had been gone, without explanation or apology, and Sherlock had gone back to being Sherlock, the way he always was.

The knowledge that Sherlock had rescued her sat in John's belly like an ulcer. He didn't understand _why._ Or rather, he was afraid he did understand.

By five pm, he couldn't take the tension any more. He made muttered excuses about checking in with his new contacts, and slipped from the hotel while Mary and Greg were still trying to beat Molly at Scrabble.

It wasn't a total lie. He _had_ told the children he'd be back. With that thought in mind, John set off at a brisk jog, keeping a wary eye out for the men he'd met the night before, or for anyone else who might take a fancy to using him as a punching bag.

.

Three hours later, he'd drawn an utter blank. Half the kids he hadn't even been able to locate, and the rest had seen and heard nothing new. After providing a newspaper parcel of soggy chips with no vinegar, he did learn that Ernesto – his first patient of the day before – was six years old, that the other members of his little gang were called Maricela, Daniel, Francisco and Joseph, and that they had a total of three parents and a step-father between them. What he didn't learn was anything useful. By the time he'd made half a dozen circuits of the town without gaining anything it was twenty past eight, and John realised with irritation that he was late for their rendezvous with Mycroft and Irene.

He paused on the hotel landing to get his breath back. He couldn't hear anything from inside, but he had no doubt they'd heard him thundering up the stairs. The Watsons' room was empty, so he slipped through the door in the back of the wardrobe into Greg and Molly's suite. Their room, too, was vacant.

"Bathroom!" he heard Molly's voice call.

Perplexed, John poked his head into the bathroom and found a second hastily-sawn doorway, this one in the back of the linen cupboard. He spared a moment to pity the hotel's maintenance workers.

Ducking his head a little to step through the gap, John found himself in the corresponding cupboard of the next room over. Squeezing past the hastily rearranged shelving, he pushed the door open and stepped out. The sight of the shower cubicle was enough to convince him never to use this route unannounced. There were some things about Mycroft that he really didn't want to know.

.

Mary's eyes zeroed in on John as he poked his head sheepishly around the bathroom door. She scanned his face, noting no new damage, only the pale bruise he'd come home with yesterday and a slight nick beneath his chin from shaving. She tried not to let her relief show too plainly, offering him only a small, cheeky smile. Billie had no such compunction; she squealed, twisting on Mary's lap to grin up at her excitedly. John shot the pair of them a wink and a quick smile.

"John," Mycroft said unctuously. "So kind of you to join us."

John shrugged. "Had to meet some people."

"Yes, so I heard. Doing precisely what I asked you not to do, and bringing yourself to the attention of the garrison in the process. Well done."

John knew Mycroft well enough not to rise to it. This was Mycroft 'mildly-irritated-but-not-in-the-least-surprised' rather than Mycroft 'flamingly-hacked-off', and John treated it as such. Mary envied him that blithe ability. Mycroft didn't scare her, but she would never be able to treat him with the cavalier assurance that John managed.

"Might've helped if you'd mentioned there _was_ a garrison," John said, mildly, perching himself on the edge of the table. "I thought they were supposed to be closing the place down."

Mycroft raised an eyebrow. "And you assumed that the entire Agency would just pack up and go home for tea and biscuits when the President whistled? How charmingly naïve."

"Oh har-de-har."

 _The Agency._ The Brits always called it that. They'd done so for as long as she could remember, as if scorning the use of anyone's acronyms but their own. And John looked so chipper, so blithely unconcerned, standing there with his ruffled hair and his cornflower-blue eyes. To him, the Agency was just another of Sherlock's mad escapades, another dragon for the two of them to slay. Mary felt a sudden thrill of fear for him, startling in its intensity. _Please God, let him never know._

 _._

* * *

.

 **A/N:** Only one single lonely review for the last chapter, so I'm resorting to outright bribery: best reviewer gets their choice of prompt/plot device incorporated into the story! If you've ever wanted to see Mary making out with Irene or Mycroft with a badger on his head, then now's your chance. Only two stipulations: (1) your request can't be "character A ends up with character B" - I'm happy to incorporate your chosen pairing if that's what you want, but not necessarily as end-game; (2) it has to be something that could conceivably fit within the flow of the story - i.e. if you _really_ want me to write wing!lock, alpha/omega, or Mycroft-is-secretly-an-octopus, then I'll try my level best, but it may have to be as part of someone's hallucinogen-enhanced dream.

N.B. "Best reviewer" means "person who gives the most useful feedback" rather than just "person who says I'm awesome". Though obviously, I don't object to that either. I'm going to try for slightly shorter chapters and more regular updates from now on. Let me know what you think. :-)

Up next: Sherlock starts scheming, and Mycroft reveals a nasty little secret...


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

.

It was a sultry, cloudless day. Somewhere overhead, a plane was droning like a sun-dazed fly. Sherlock wriggled backwards, insinuating himself more deeply into the shelter of a scraggly thorn bush. Lying on his belly, he raised his arms and inspected the sleeves of his coat. Damp earth adhered clingingly to the elbows. He brushed at it gloomily.

The drone of the aeroplane faded into a whine. It balanced for a moment on the edge of hearing before fading out completely. Abandoning his ineffectual efforts against the mud, he raised the field glasses back to his eyes and resumed his surveillance.

About a mile and a half south west and perhaps a mile below him, the camp sprawled. Beyond it the bay glittered, postcard-perfect, turquoise waves glinting in the sun.

Sherlock focused the binoculars more tightly, tight enough to identify the birds perching on the razor wire. Half a dozen sparrows and another small finch of some kind; nothing he cared about. On a tower nearby, a trio of herring gulls were squabbling with a juvenile black-backed.

A male sparrow ducked its head, pecking at a speck of something beneath its curled toes. Its plumage was dishevelled, the black band above its eye ruffled out of alignment. It looked curiously piratical.

The sparrow pecked again, hopping awkwardly to maintain its balance. The plumage really was rather striking, Sherlock mused. This close, he could make out the individual feathers, noticing the multitudinous shades of brown that made up such a seemingly drab little bird.

Sherlock was sprawled halfway up an exposed hill on the Cuban side of the border. They hadn't made it easy for him. Directly in front of him lay a high fence, a sprawling chaos of _Opuntia_ cactus and, he knew (though thankfully not through personal experience), a broad swathe of fifty-year-old landmines.

 _Friendly_.

To Sherlock's immense irritation, he could see no plausible way through the barricade. Whilst aware that he lacked a certain something when it came to self-preservation, he still wasn't overly keen on tangling with a minefield. If John had been here, he might perhaps have been able to shed some light ( _'I wasn't in bomb disposal'_ , his inner-John grumbled. ' _I'm a bloody doctor'_ ), but John wasn't there. John was at home in Kensington with a wife and a baby and probably, by now, some sort of tedious domestic pet. Sherlock scowled. All according to plan, of course, but _god_ the upshot was _dull._

Dropping the field glasses, he contemplated the camp again. God, it was an eyesore. All concrete, tin, scuffed earth and barbed wire, with clusters of tents sprouting here and there like fungi. The colour scheme was unrelentingly beige, relieved only by the obnoxious totems to those American gods, Starbucks and McDonalds. Sherlock wrinkled his nose.

 _Aerial, marine, or road?_ he wondered, surveying the possible entry points. Theoretically, the roads in and out were strictly controlled – foot traffic only, multiple checkpoints – but they clearly weren't impassable, for all that. He'd seen American soldiers in both Caimanera and Boqueron (ostensibly incognito, but so _obvious_ ), hanging around the bars and brothels like so much refuse. _Aerial, marine or road?_ He filed the options away in his mind palace for later perusal.

Sherlock watched as a pair of uniformed guards crossed one of the compounds and vanished, in tandem, into a steel shack inside Camp Delta. That was another problem, of course. None of his contacts had been able to give him any information as to which of the several camps Knight was actually being held in. Really, the only way to know for sure was to get inside and find out. Sherlock fought another pang of gloom, thinking of John. John loved break-ins.

Sherlock shook off his self-pity. John not being here was, after all, rather the point. Not without some difficulty, he extricated himself from the barbed embrace of the thorn bush and slung the strap of his field glasses over his shoulder. Turning away from the border and the gleaming sea beyond, he began the steady trudge back uphill towards the road. There was nothing more for him to learn here.

.

* * *

John was caught off-guard by just how much Mycroft looked like Sherlock. There had been a certain brotherly likeness before, of course, but it was a likeness composed mostly of long limbs, a few shared mannerisms, and a certain something in their profiles. John was unprepared for a Mycroft with loose curls, an amethyst-coloured shirt, and a long dark coat with a turned-up collar. The image so disarmed him that, for the moment, he had failed to register Irene at all.

The Woman, oddly enough, didn't take well to being ignored. She rose from her chair and stepped towards him, all poise and creamy complexion and elaborately coiled hair.

"Hello, John." She took his hand and inclined her head to kiss his cheek.

John hated that Irene was taller than him. A lot of women were, of course, but he'd never resented it so viscerally with anyone before her. She had scarcely anything on him – a couple of centimetres at most – but those few centimetres were currently bolstered by a pair of elegant and expensive-looking heels. John hated them.

"It's been a long time," Irene said, a low, playful timbre in her voice. John laughed shortly.

"Not long enough if you ask me." His own voice came out tight and angry.

Irene smiled disarmingly, not in the least offended. "Don't be cross with me, Doctor Watson. _I_ didn't lose him."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

John was irritated with himself. He'd let her get under his skin again, the way he'd known she would, the way he couldn't stop her from doing.

"Only that you moved on very _quickly._ " Irene said, with an utterly unveiled glance at Mary. "How long did it take exactly after you buried him? Was it the whole two years, or only the one?"

" _We were never a couple!_ "

"That's not what I saw."

"If I might cut across the adolescent posturing," Mycroft interjected, with a long-suffering sigh. "We do in fact have work to do this evening."

Greg and Molly looked relieved. John saw them exchanging glances out of the corner of his eye; the sort that said 'Woops! John's a little off the deep end tonight, isn't he?'. The sight did not improve his temper.

"No," Mary said, interjecting very sweetly and unexpectedly. "I think your friend has something she wants to say, so we might as well do this now."

She rose from the sofa, chin up, and stepped forward until she was looking Irene in the face. Mary, John noticed with satisfaction, was _not_ shorter than her.

"Now," Mary said, in that same tone of honey layered over steel. "Let's get a few things straightened out, shall we? John is my husband. Sherlock, hard as it may be for you to believe it, is my friend. Sherlock has never been inside John's pants; and who knows? If he wanted to, I might let him." She smiled pleasantly, eyes hard. "But either way, it is none of your damn business."

"Whew." Greg huffed out a breath. "Easy-on, Mrs Watson." His mouth twisted in an exaggerated expression somewhere between respect and mock-terror. This time, John did find it amusing. He supressed a grin at the sight of his wife, baby on her hip, threatening Moriarty's favourite dominatrix. One to tell Sherlock about, when they got him back.

Irene hadn't backed down. Her mouth was still curved, dimpled ironically at the corners, her lower lip pressed outward in a pout that he might have called beguiling if he didn't know her better.

"Mm. That _would_ be pretty," she said. "I could sell tickets."

" _Enough_." Mycroft called the meeting to order. Mary and Irene were still eyeing one another with mutual dislike, but Mary subsided grudgingly back onto the sofa.

"So what's the grand plan, boss?" Greg asked, trying to keep things light.

Mycroft's mouth twitched with irritation, whether at being called 'boss' or at Greg's tone, John didn't know.

"Manifold," he said. "I do not know where my brother is or what he intends, save only that he aims to get inside the facility at Guantanamo Bay and rescue my agent. Ideally, we will intercept him before he gets there, but that may be being optimistic. It is likely that he is seeking a way in as we speak, if he hasn't found one already." Mycroft raised a long-suffering eyebrow. "And I doubt very much that he has a plan to get out again."

"Any word on Knight?" John asked. "Do we know if he's even there to rescue, or is this a trap?"

Mycroft frowned. "Irene and I encountered two sources who were convinced that he still lives; unless they are better actors than I have ever given them credit for then they, at least, are convinced of the truth of it."

"Could still be a set-up though, couldn't it?"

"Indeed. In fact, I think it likely." Mycroft hesitated – a momentary, uncharacteristic pause, before continuing. "In any case, Knight's life is not worth Sherlock's." If John hadn't known better, he might have thought that the choice gave Mycroft pain.

"So, strategy?" Greg asked briskly. "Do we try to bust in there and hope he shows up, or what?"

"I hope it won't come to that," Mycroft said. "There are several avenues to pursue. I have obtained the name of a contact who knows of Sherlock; I will attempt to locate him. It is for this reason that I am endeavouring to, ah, _heighten_ my similarity to Sherlock."

He glanced sideways. "John, you will accompany me. The names of Holmes-and-Watson have a certain notoriety, it would seem. Your presence will enhance my credentials with our contact."

John just nodded.

"Gregory, I would like you to find out what you can about the local police force. As a general rule, they are not fond of the American facility – which may make them our allies. No contact, but observe what you can; which officers are reliable and which are not, which divisions function well, the timing of shifts, the duty roster… Do you think you can do this?"

"Sure. Piece of piss." He looked momentarily abashed, and his cheeks pinkened somewhat. "Sorry."

John grinned internally. He'd never seen anyone but Mrs Hudson who could make Greg apologise for his language before. Another one to share with Sherlock.

Mycroft sent Greg a sideways glance, but didn't comment. "I would also like you, if you would, to take up John's work with the local children. It's as much of a _modus operandi_ as Sherlock has, so it's worth investigating."

John couldn't repress the grin this time. Mycroft had as much as admitted John was right.

"I want you to work alongside Irene as much as possible; keep in contact, use each other for back up. Miss Addler, I don't believe that you need any instructions from me – just do what you do best."

"And what might that be?"

Mycroft smiled thinly. " _Misbehave._ Repeatedly, if you would be so kind. With as many members of the Agency or their support staff as you can, ah, _lay hands on._ Though discreetly, please."

"Naturally."

"Good. Miss Hooper."

Molly looked startled at being addressed, as though she hadn't expected Mycroft to notice her.

"What can I do?"

"You are our new officer of misinformation. Congratulations."

"I don't understand."

Mycroft waved an airy hand.

"Emails, social media, Doctor Watson's _blog._ " He sniffed. "Maintaining for as long as possible the pretence that you are all still on your lovely little European _holiday._ I have a laptop you can use for the purpose – one that can't be traced. _"_

"Oh."

Molly looked a little disappointed, but also a little relieved.

"Also, of course, babysitting."

"Right," said Molly, looking a little perturbed. Mycroft's personality, John reflected, could do that to a person.

"And where will Mary be?" Molly asked, still uncertain.

"Ah yes." Mycroft's smile, this time, was cold. "Be so good as to remind me, Ms. Agnew; I have lost track. Precisely where, at the present moment, do your loyalties lie?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" John demanded.

"Only that your wife's double-game did not end with shooting Sherlock. Or triple-game, perhaps I should say – credit where credit's due."

"Triple-game? What…"

"A simple enough formula, I'm afraid: bluff you and Sherlock into believing her tale of repentance; bluff the Americans into believing that she is still their faithful agent; and sell anything that the Americans won't use to Charles Magnusson or the next highest bidder. Is that about all, Mary dear?"

His eyes flashed with steel as he turned at last, fixing the full force of his gaze on Mary.

.

* * *

.

 **A/N:** So... guessing no one saw this coming, right? *Cough*. Um, yeah...

Thanks so much to the four lovely people who responded to my begging for reviews last chapter. It is immensely appreciated. Next up: Mycroft is really, really not a nice guy sometimes.


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen.

.

There was a strange ringing in Mary's ears. The silence in the room had a chill like deep water. She could hear the distant thrum of voices from the hotel courtyard and the quiet tick of a clock. She could hear somebody's breath, slow and deliberately controlled. It seemed to take a long time before she recognised it as her own.

Around her, the faces of John and the others were gape-mouthed, wrinkled-browed, comical. Mary felt an untimely desire to laugh. Only Mycroft looked grim.

Inadvertently, her eyes flicked down to Mycroft's long, delicate-looking hands. That left hand had once held her arm behind her back so hard that a muscle in her shoulder had torn. The right had once held her by the throat, so tightly that she'd felt her vision blur, darkness eating at the edges of her sight.

Unbidden, the memory of the night she'd shot Sherlock flashed into her mind: the mobile in Mycroft's hand; the grainy, real-time footage from the fisheye lens somewhere near the ceiling of the operating theatre. Somehow, Mycroft had got surveillance in there, had managed to piggyback the hospital's systems so that his brother's every laboured breath and every fluttering heartbeat was broadcast directly to his phone. Most of the screen had been taken up with the video feed, but the readout from the heartrate monitor had scrolled below it, running in rapid spikes – a strange counterpoint to the preternatural calm of the surgical team. Mycroft had held her by the neck against a brick wall, forcing her to look; forcing her to watch as silver implements sliced into Sherlock's porcelain-white skin and the monitor beat a panicked tempo.

What had surprised her most had been Mycroft's strength. She'd guessed by then that he must have been in better form than his carefully-cut suits and his carefully-cultivated belly suggested, or he'd never have been let out without a dozen bodyguards. She was aware enough, by then, to have connected Edward Mycroft George Holmes with Edward Ellis, Samuel Liminov, Mykhail Mykhaylenko and Antonin Ward, and even with a handful of code names in half a dozen ancient but painstakingly-gleaned transcripts (Ice Man, King-maker, Argus, Tolstoy, The Tailor). She'd thought she'd known what she was dealing with.

Mycroft had found her before she'd got even a mile from Magnussen's office. He'd had two of his people with him – the woman called Anthea and another, a tall black man. He hadn't needed either of them. He was behind her before Mary – before Amanda Grace Reid Agnew, on full alert – had even heard his approach. He'd batted away her weapon with a single movement, his eyes as hard as death. He'd forced her against the wall, pinning her with his weight, impervious to her kicking feet and thrashing arms. His knee had forced itself between her thighs, his hip bone had pressed cruelly into the small of her back, and she had felt a rush of that entirely specific, entirely sexual terror that few men ever experience.

And then he'd made her watch. Every slice of a scalpel, every needle, every tube, every stitch. She'd seen Sherlock's face, bloodless and slack, the shape of his mouth distorted by the oxygen tube. She'd heard the crack as they broke his two lowest ribs, seeking a way in. She'd heard the klaxon-like warning of the machines and the cursing of the anaesthetist as his blood-oxygen plummeted abruptly to zero.

 _'Fuck',_ the anaesthetist had said. ' _What the bloody fuck?'_ Not as if she was distressed. Not like she was terrified for Sherlock's singular brain, or his singular life. Just ' _fuck',_ as if she were annoyed.

And the heartbeat on the monitor had flat-lined.

Mary's own heart had seemed to stop along with it. She'd felt a throat-clenching terror overtake her, her stomach roiling until she'd thought she would vomit. Mycroft's grip upon her neck had tightened convulsively and she had choked, stars bursting in front of her eyes.

And Mycroft had picked her up and tossed her against the wall, the way a labourer might toss a sack of grain.

She'd smashed into the brick, head and shoulder first, and crumpled to the ground. She'd felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her abdomen and a thunder of drum-beat heels as the baby kicked frantically. It had been the first time she'd felt Billie move.

Mycroft had been pitiless. He had tugged at his cuffs, straightened the line of his jacket, and stared down, cold-eyed at where she lay sprawled.

"If you'll excuse me," he had said. "I should be with John."

And that had been all.

Mary glanced again at Mycroft's hands, resisting the urge to clutch Billie to her chest.

She could still smell the damp brick.

.

"– about? Mycroft? Say what you mean for once in your life _for fuck's sake_."

It was John who was speaking. His voice was rough and angry, and cracked on the word _fuck._

Of course; _John_. Beautiful, phenomenal John.

And then Mycroft was speaking, his voice lacking even its customary unctuousness in the intensity of his venom:

"I mean, John, that your wife has lied to you time and time again; that she has never ceased lying to you. She may be retired in the eyes of the Agency at large, but she has been contracted to Special Branch for as long as you've known her. Your wife is a sleeper agent, John. She was placed in London by her masters so as to be in a position to fulfil a number of unsavoury tasks if and when they ever called upon her to do so. Not the least of those tasks was my eventual assassination."

"Eventual?" Greg managed, croakily.

Mycroft shrugged. "An inevitability, once the difficulties I made for them began to outweigh the perceived benefits of our supposed alliance. Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long. I must be losing my touch."

He turned to look at her at last, as fierce, as arrogant as his brother ever was. She heard a stifled squeak from Molly and an oath from Greg. John was silent, trembling, the knuckles showing white in his fists.

Mary found her voice at last. "I haven't told them we're here. I swear. I never told them we'd left London."

"I know. So you can naturally understand my curiosity regarding your loyalties."

John shifted, frowning, but didn't say anything. Mary closed her eyes, willing herself not to lose control.

"Did Sherlock know?"

"Not until after you shot him, no. For some reason, no doubt stemming from misguided consideration for Doctor Watson, he forebore to investigate you. Afterwards, I rather think that the idea of making friends with my assassin-elect amused him."

Irene Adler had drawn a weapon. A pistol, mid-range. She held it with appropriate intent, but she wasn't Anthea, by any means. Her hand was steady, but her grip was awkward, unfamiliar (' _No particular skill with weaponry_ '; Mary remembered Mycroft's phrase). The will to do it, then, but not the skill set. Not enough to beat Amanda Agnew.

For a moment, for half a heartbeat, she considered it. Swing Billie aside onto the couch; draw and fire before Irene even had time to find her aim. The woman first, then Mycroft – an easy one-two, like duck shooting. Lestrade would be a threat: he had the size to take her down and he'd have the time to do it before she could turn, if he was quick off the mark. On balance, though, she didn't think he would. All his training, all his instinct would be _civilians first._ He'd reach for Molly, get her behind the cover of the bed, and make for Billie second.

And that left John.

And she knew, without even having to look at him, that she couldn't do it.

She looked at Mycroft, hopelessly. This was why they called him the king-maker. She'd thought, long ago, that she'd stolen a march on him; that he'd believed her ties to the C.I.A. to be severed for good. She'd been as blameless as a church mouse after the Magnusson fiasco: no contact with her handler or the local station agent; no efforts to thwart Mycroft's watchers; not even the barest of codes or signals; no Facebook post about a favourite recipe to signify ' _mission aborted'_ ; no new subscription to _Home and Garden_ to indicate _'deep cover, do not contact'._ She'd waited nine and a half months before she'd made a move – six months of John living back at Baker Street, refusing to talk to her; six and a half months of Billie's gestation; three and a half months after Sherlock's absurd, reckless Christmas shoot out; three months and two days of her daughter's little life. In doing so, she'd passed up a score of opportunities, had sacrificed valuable contacts and refrained from reporting crucial intelligence.

Even after she had finally made contact once more (walking past a particular delicatessen on Marylebone Road with a copy of the _Guardian_ sticking from her handbag on a Wednesday afternoon), her movements had been achingly cautious. Her silence had earned her a proper bollocking, yet even that had been deferred in favour of keeping Mycroft sweet. Slowly, torturously slowly, she'd slipped back into the game, one ear always to the ground for even a whisper of Mycroft's suspicion.

She'd waited nine and a half months, and still, Mycroft the bastard had been watching her.

She knew what he was offering now: her family.

The price: her country.

He hadn't even needed to play her. He'd just slipped John Watson into her path and let her play herself. And, like a sentimental fool, Amanda Grace Reid Agnew had spun the noose with which she was now, for her sins, to be hanged.

In the end, it was barely even a choice.

She looked up at him, hopelessly, searching his unremarkable face.

"What do you want?" she asked him.

Mycroft looked down at her, and there was a fleeting hint of compassion in the lines that framed his mouth.

" _You._ Your skills, your loyalty, your contacts, your access. I want everything you have ever known about Guantanamo, and every favour you have left to call in. I want everything that you can give me."

.

* * *

Sherlock Holmes wasn't an addict; he was a user (' _And so sayeth every man who ever ended his days puking his guts up behind some old biddy's dustbins'_ – the voice in his mind sounded like John) _._ In Sherlock's case, however, the distinction was substantively correct. His mind was not like other minds. Cocaine triggered many of the usual responses, of course – the euphoria, the increased heart rate, occasional hallucinations – but those things were secondary. It was only the clarity that mattered; the ability to rise clear of extraneous detail to focus on the case at hand.

Sherlock's mind was mapped out, in its entirety, in his own consciousness. _A mind within a mind_. If he attuned his focus to it, he could know and recognise every synapse, every neurotransmitter, every chemical pathway. Introduce a solution of benzoylmethylecgonine, precisely calculated, and watch the buggers dance.

Sherlock closed his eyes, seeing the strands of his plan to break into the prison complex laid out before him in his mind's eye. His hands twitched delicately, tugging a strand here, flicking away an extraneous detail there. Barbed wire. Landmines. Camouflage; orange jumpsuits; detainees; watchtowers. Camp X-ray, Camp Delta, Camp Echo, Camp Iguana, Camp 7, Camp No, Penny Lane. _'What have you taken, Sherlock?'_ (John – Irrelevant. Delete).

Barbed wire. Landmines. Guardrooms; patrols; assault rifles. _'I mean it Sherlock. What have you taken?'_ (Get out of my head. I'm _busy._ ). _'Have you made a list, Sherlock?'_ (Piss off, Mycroft!).

His brother would have sent someone after him by now. Sherlock had tried to time the postcard so that Mycroft couldn't catch him – not if he wanted to avoid the usual channels and prevent an international fall-out. But whomever his brother had sent would be in Cuba by now. He'd have to watch his step. He wanted them as a safety net in case he'd miscalculated, but not close enough on his heels to get in his way. The memory of Serbia flicked into his mind, and he scowled. Perhaps a _little_ closer behind him wouldn't be a bad thing.

At that moment, there came the sound of small, hasty feet pounding up the stairs. It was followed almost immediately by a heavy thumping at the door of the squalid room he was currently inhabiting.

"Piss off! I'm busy."

It didn't deter his visitor. With some effort, the door was shoved open, squealing as it ground over the warped floorboards. A dark head was shoved through the opening. Scrawny, male, perhaps elevenish.

"You are right!" the boy told him. He gave a gap-toothed grin. "A man is searching for you."

Sherlock scowled, disliking the disruption to his thought process but recognising its necessity. "Who?"

"I do not know. A _guero._ " The boy shrugged, and thought some more. "Maybe an old man. Fat, but not _fat_ fat."

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Which could mean anybody from Mycroft to Stephen Fry."

"Que?"

"Actually scratch that. Mycroft's definitely _fat_ fat."

"Que?"

"Never mind." He waved a hand toward a shelf by the door, where a handful of banknotes sat cushioned between a pistol and a mug with a broken handle. "Now take the money and get out."

The child left without the need for platitudes. Children were good like that.

Sherlock drew a deep breath, hands stilling for a moment at his temples, and began again.

Barbed wire. Landmines. Checkpoints…

He knew there was a risk. He wasn't foolish enough to believe otherwise, and – contrary to some of John's less-complementary mutterings – he'd never had a God complex.

There was a risk, yes, but sometimes risks were necessary.

.

* * *

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 **A/N:** Children can be cruel observers. Poor John. ;-) Thanks as always to those lovely people who take the time to review. Almost up to 30! Yay!

Next up: In which John and Mycroft go a-hunting...


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

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Sidestepping his way through the crowded marketplace, John followed obediently in Mycroft's wake. He was glad to be outside. The close quarters and confinement of the hotel, since Mycroft and Irene's arrival, had become almost unbearable. _Of course, that had nothing to do with his lying bitch of a wife._

The row that had followed Mycroft's little exposé of the night before had been one of the worst ever. It had rivaled even the revelation that Mary had been responsible for Sherlock's near-murder and, unlike that occasion, there hadn't been a consulting drama queen around to distract them. Mary hadn't come to bed. Instead, she'd spent the night plotting with Mycroft and Irene, presumably selling out yet more people who'd once relied upon her in the process. John, naturally, had been excluded. Instead, he'd spent the night lying tense as a bowstring in a cold bed, wondering whether it might not be better just to cut and run. Get the hell out of the hotel, away from Mycroft and his fat, smug face, away from Irene's smirk and Greg's pitying glances. Away from his wife. If he could just get out and find Sherlock, if they could go back home to Baker Street and tea and crimes and arguments over _Top Gear_ and Mrs Hudson's shortbread _…_

But of course, he couldn't do any of those things. He hadn't a hope of finding Sherlock on his own, much less evading a pissed off Mary-and-Mycroft tag team. Besides, there was Billie. She'd been restless again last night, still miserable about the altered time zone and prepared to let him know it. He'd brought her to bed with him, her tiny body helping to fill the cold space left by Mary's absence. He'd recited as much of _The Lorax_ as he could from memory, played a gentle game of peek-a-boo with her until she'd managed to tire herself out, and then lain in the dark, stroking her soft hair while she slept. He'd been amazed to realise how much she'd grown. With her head beneath his chin, her toes now reached to halfway down his thigh. The corn-silk hair that she'd had since birth was thicker now, long enough to skim the nape of her neck. Her hand, clutching his finger as she slept, now spanned past the second knuckle.

And if everything had gone the way her mother intended, she might never have existed at all.

John shook his head, trying to shake loose the anger that throbbed beneath his skin, and concentrated on his partner in crime. Mycroft was striding ahead of him as if he owned the street, long legs eating up the pavement. His hair tossed with every step and his long coat billowed behind him, utterly ridiculous in the Cuban heat. He looked absurd. His hair was the wrong colour, his face was the wrong shape, and shirts that tight, in John's professional opinion, should not be worn by anybody with Mycroft's degree of middle-aged spread.

"Come along John, keep up."

John rolled his eyes. The shirt and the hair and the face might be wrong, but the tone of snotty impatience was spot-on.

"Coming," he said, not altering his pace even slightly.

.

Their destination was a grotty little café-bar on the western bank of the harbour, a place where, Mycroft assured him, they would find a source leading to Sherlock. John was more than a little dubious, not least because Mycroft's information had apparently been derived from some poor sap who'd made the near-fatal mistake of trying to bed Irene. Nor did the appearance of the café inspire confidence. The patrons sat at grimy tables nursing mugs of something dark and potent-smelling. There was no conversation. Their eyes followed John and Mycroft, hostile and un-blinking. John resisted the temptation to reach for the tyre iron he had shoved down the back of his jeans (Mycroft had refused to allow him a gun).

Ignoring both the wait-staff and the silent stares of the patrons, Mycroft strode unerringly between the tables towards a beaded curtain behind the bar. He ducked through it without glancing at John, and, grumbling internally, John followed.

He'd expected a kitchen, or perhaps the private quarters of the owners. What he got instead was a narrow wooden staircase that plunged downwards, unlit, into a shadowy basement, the steps covered in borer dust and fragments of broken glass. The top of Mycroft's head was already disappearing into the gloom. All his efforts at mimicking Sherlock's hairstyle couldn't entirely disguise the thin patch at his crown. John grinned.

He shuffled his way down the stairs in Mycroft's wake, not entirely sharing the other man's confidence in the sagging steps, or his apparent ability to see in the dark. When they finally emerged, it was into a subterranean concrete basement with all the charm of a soviet-era bunker. It probably _was_ one. Here, too, there were patrons sitting at tables, and here too they eyed the interlopers with barely concealed hostility. They were all men, John noticed. Sculpted muscles were very much in evidence, as were sagging black vests and hairy armpits. Cards and bottles covered most available surfaces. There were also several blackjack tables, a couple of dusty pokie machines, and stacks of chips at every elbow.

Mycroft turned and shot him an infuriating smirk. "Care to indulge an old talent?"

John growled.

He'd done a lot of gambling once, in the army. It was a way to pass the time, and he was good at it. Sherlock might claim that he was an open book, but as Sherlock could read _everyone_ it hardly signified _._ Amongst other people – normal people – John was considered, in fact, to have a pretty good poker face. He'd been good enough that he usually won or drew even – at least when playing with his mates and not betting against a stacked house. But he was also particularly bad at calling in debts, and he'd never found there was much fun to be had in stripping the last pennies from an eighteen year old kid on a Private's wage. Somewhere around about his fourth year in Afghanistan, he'd worked out that, while he might have been winning the cards, he was actually _losing_ the damn money.

And so he'd tried to stop. And had discovered, to his eternal chagrin, that it was rather more difficult than he had anticipated.

Whether bringing it up now was Mycroft's idea of a joke or not, John didn't know, but he didn't exactly want to argue about it with a bunch of meat-heads eyeing them up for tonight's supper, so he satisfied himself with an insulting hand gesture. Then he headed for the nearest table and drew up a chair alongside a man who looked like he had a goat for a mother.

"Are you girls playing, or what?"

With a grunt, the dealer swept the cards towards him and began to shuffle. Around them, a low level of chatter gradually resumed. Mycroft, joining the game on the other side of the table, eyed his cards with distaste.

For perhaps half an hour, they simply played. John had no idea what Mycroft was thinking or what the end game was, but the other men at the table had gradually relaxed and stopped looking as though they wanted to bake his head, so he was reasonably content. Compared to some of the things Sherlock had made him do, gambling with gorillas was practically a day at the office.

So immersed was he in the game that it took him a moment to realise that everyone around him had fallen quiet. John looked up from his hand (a promising baby straight) and into the eyes of a man who had appeared at his shoulder almost silently. Two others stood behind Mycroft's chair.

Despite their being rather smaller and tidier than the bar's average inhabitant, John knew instantly that these three were the dangerous ones. The man at his shoulder was slim and young, not much above John's own height. His hair was in blond spikes and his hands rested, completely relaxed, in the pockets of his jeans. The two blokes behind Mycroft were darker, and alike enough that they were probably brothers.

The one behind Mycroft's left shoulder posed a question in Spanish. Mycroft's eyes flickered, but he did not rise. He folded his cards neatly and laid them on the table in front of him before replying. His tone was low and soft. John didn't understand what was being said, but he caught both 'Holmes' and 'Watson", and presumed Mycroft was introducing them.

The man conducting the interrogation gave what appeared to be an order, and John was hauled unceremoniously to his feet. He didn't struggle or try to fight. Struggling was for little boys who didn't understand the way these things worked, and over the last few years John had been hauled off and interrogated more times than he'd like to count. He did wince a little as his captor discovered the tyre iron he had stashed down the back of his jeans. Blondie tugged it from his waistband with a single sharp motion, but that didn't stop it from scraping his arse on the way out. Great. He was going to have bruises where bruises weren't meant to go.

Blondie dropped the tyre iron contemptuously, and it clattered on the concrete floor, smacking John on the back of the ankle.

"Bloody ow," he grumbled.

Mycroft smirked.

"It appears that the lady of the house is expecting us," he told John. He stepped away from the table, keeping his hands where the men could see them. "Shall we, gentlemen?"

.

John and Mycroft were manhandled through a door at the rear of the cellar, along a dark passage, and up another flight of sticky, glass-strewn stairs, emerging in what appeared to be the next building over. The slim, blond man kept John's right arm pinned to his side with one hand and held his left twisted behind his back with little apparent effort. That the man had chosen to control John's dominant hand rather than the more obvious right did not escape him, and he felt a sense of disquiet that had nothing at all to do with the complaining muscles in his left shoulder.

Together, they were hauled through an external door into an enclosed courtyard, then up a further flight of debilitated, sun-bleached stairs that might once have been a serviceable fire escape. Propelled awkwardly by their captors, they ducked beneath a final beaded curtain and into a room so remarkable that John stood transfixed. The walls were yellow ochre, startlingly bright after the dingy cellar, and plastered with a veritable rainbow of posters and tapestries; images of Krishna in the garden jostled for space with Muhammad Ali and Fidel Castro; a blue-eyed, red-lipped Christ exposed his heart in glorious technicolour, hemmed in on either side by a snarling tiger and a high-kicking Bruce Lee. A dozen wall-sconces were filled to overflowing with icons, candles, and plastic figurines that might have come from McDonalds Happy Meals. The paint on the doors and window frames was bubbled and peeling, but what remained was a vivid and unapologetic turquoise. Scarlet geraniums bloomed in profusion on every windowsill, and enormous vases of silk flowers smothered every available surface.

If the room was remarkable though, it was nothing to the woman who sat enthroned in its midst. Her enormous bulk was spread across a vast sofa of red velvet, her immensity barely concealed by a robe-like garment of orange and purple. Though she was clearly in her sixties or seventies, she had retained a thick braid of wildly frizzing dark hair and brown, supple skin like a teenager's. Her dark eyes glinted with intelligence.

"Mr Holmes," she said, her voice low and hoarse and sultry. "I am delighted at last to meet you. And Doctor Watson too. A pleasure."

Mycroft actually bowed. "Madame Palazuelos, I presume."

The woman chuckled, and said something in Spanish to her guards. The man holding John released him, and John tugged at his shoulder, feeling the joint click as he massaged it. He winced.

"Mr Holmes and Doctor Watson," Madame Palazuelos reiterated, with a broad smile. "I have looked forward to meeting you now some time."

Mycroft's eyebrows quirked. "Likewise, I'm sure. Your reputation precedes you, madame."

The woman laughed richly, her several chins wobbling, though John noticed that the gleam in her eyes was sharp rather than amused.

"So what is it that you want from Madame, Mr Holmes?"

"I think you already know the answer to that."

The woman's head cocked to one side, assessing. "Maybe Madame knows. _Si._ Maybe. The famous Mr Holmes comes to me for information, and maybe Madame can provide."

"In exchange for a generous reimbursement, obviously," Mycroft said drily. Madame's face split into an unashamed grin.

"Twenty thousand dollars, US."

"Five."

"Fifteen."

"Seven."

"Twelve."

"Seven."

She grinned again. "Seven ok, detective man. Because I like you."

Mycroft's mouth twitched in amusement, but he removed a thin leather wallet from the breast pocket of his coat and withdrew seven crisp, foreign-looking notes. The wallet, John was amused to note, contained not a single penny more.

Madame Palazuelos tucked the money tenderly down the front of her capacious bosom and beckoned the two of them closer.

"Sit, sit. Now we can do business, _si_?"

John's erstwhile captor drew a pair of armchairs forward towards the sofa and motioned them to sit. John subsided into the offered chair with a pointed glare that told the man quite plainly that he hadn't forgotten the damage to his shoulder.

"So, Mr Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson," Madame Palazuelos crooned softly. "What do two Englishmen want to know? Something about a man, yes? Special man." She chuckled. " _Secret agent man,_ maybe?"

"Your perspicacity is admirable, madame."

"Man called Kni-ight," she said, drawing out the name, curling her pink tongue between her lips.

"Yes," Mycroft confirmed. It was only the fact that he knew Sherlock so well that allowed John to recognise that the elder Holmes brother was on edge, even afraid.

"Agent Knight in Guantanamo. In the prison," she said softly. "Bad, bad hurt. Broken back, broken legs, lashes from the whip, many, many."

The smallest finger of Mycroft's right hand twitched, barely perceptibly.

"When?" he asked. "When was this?"

"Three year ago, maybe four. Agent Knight with the Americans a long time. Maybe better now. Maybe dead. Who knows?"

"How do you know of him?"

"Carlo, my boy, he work in the American prison. Eight year, nine year. Carlo sweeps the yard where prisoners walk, washes the cells, takes away shit of Americans in big tanks. Maria, his wife, she makes the coffee and food for soldiers. Then Americans decide they don't want Cubans inside big prison no more. Cubans all go home. But Carlo remembers Agent Knight, thinks that Englishmen might be _very_ interested to know where Agent Knight is staying now."

Mycroft gave a tight nod. He looked as calm and collected as John had ever seen him, but his face was very pale.

"And your Carlo is in danger now, is that right?"

Madame Palazeulos turned her great, heavy head towards him. "My Carlo is a poor man, Mr Holmes. He sells what he can, where he can. A year ago now, he sell this information, but he is not careful enough. Now Americans know what he sells, and they are looking for him. Very dangerous for Carlo."

Mycroft met her eyes steadily. "And where is Carlo now?"

For a long, slow moment, the woman looked at him. John found himself holding his breath.

Slowly, the woman reached towards the little table that stood between them. She retrieved a notepad patterned with pictures of kittens, and scribbled an address with a turquoise pen. She folded the topmost sheet of paper carefully, first in half, then into quarters, and handed it, not to Mycroft, but to John. John looked at her, surprised, and the woman laughed.

"I trust Doctor Watson," she said, with a sly grin. "Not so much Sherlock Holmes."

John grinned. He took the address with a flourish and made a great show of folding it safely into his wallet.

Mycroft rose gracefully to his feet, and John followed, inclining his head to Madame Palazuelos. Apparently, their interview was at an end.

They had taken no more than three paces towards the door when there was an outbreak of voluble Spanish. One of the brothers who had apprehended Mycroft earlier had broken away from his post by the door, waving a mobile phone and shouting. John didn't understand, but he saw Mycroft's surprise, and realised with alarm that Mycroft was drawing in on himself, centering his weight and preparing to fight. Instinctively, John spun around, setting himself back to back with Mycroft and dropping into a protective crouch. All three of the guards were coming for them now, the blond man vaulting over furniture in his haste. A roundhouse punch came swinging towards him and John dodged right. Then a kick was speeding in his direction, chest height, and fast enough to send him sprawling. He darted left, just managing to block the flying foot with a shoulder charge, knocking his assailant off balance. To his horror, he realised that several other men had come charging up the stairs from the courtyard. Three, maybe four, but he didn't have time to count them.

He felt movement behind him and he spun, only to see a dreadlocked man go flying. Mycroft performed a manoeuvre that John would have sworn, mere minutes ago, that he wasn't capable of, sending another assailant sailing back down the stairs the way he'd come. John ducked another blow and delivered a punch that connected with something solid and fleshy, though he wasn't precisely sure what. The blond man leaped over him, making for the sofa where Madame Palazuelos still sat, mouth open in a scream that seemed part rage, part excitement. The blond man was shouting something, and it was only as John straightened, seeing Mycroft deliver a short, sharp blow to someone's abdomen, that he heard what is was they were fighting about:

"That man! That man is not Sherlock Holmes!"

.

* * *

.

 **A/N.** My sincere apologies for how late this chapter is. I really have no excuse other than the fact that my life is apparently busier than I've ever given it credit for. I very much hope that the next chapter won't take so long. Exposition is coming, I promise. Just hang in there.

Thanks, as always, to everyone who's reviewed since I last posted. I love you all. Up next: John finally finds out what the hell is going on, and Sherlock breaks in to a maximum security prison in his underwear...


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

.

"I _told you_ you looked nothing like Sherlock, you berk!"

Mycroft sniffed. "It worked for long enough, didn't it?"

John swore thickly. The bridge of his nose was already swelling, and their rapid flight had done nothing to stem the flow of blood. His shirt front and the crotch of his jeans were soaked with it and it felt, from the stickiness, as though it had made its way into his pants as well. Mulishly, he peeled a particularly viscous strand of blood-stained mucous off his neck and flicked it into the gutter.

Mycroft, in all fairness, wasn't doing a hell of a lot better. He was limping heavily and hugging his ribs. His right ear was a pulpy, purple mass, and a rivulet of drying blood ran down the side of his neck and into his collar.

"Are you even going to explain that?"

Mycroft gave a put-upon sigh. His sneer only emphasised the bloody residue left around his teeth.

"It answers something that has been puzzling me: who revealed that Knight was in Guantanamo in the first place? According to Tomas Coulter – the man Irene and I interrogated in Bern – Sherlock learned about it from a German named Jorg Olbrich. But how did Olbrich know? He was present at Knight's ersatz execution and knew he had been sold to the Americans, but that was ten years ago. Why reveal it now? The fact that he sought Sherlock specifically argues that his knowledge of Knight's whereabouts was recent information: so where did he get it? I suspected Madame Palazuelos, who has a history of selling small scraps of information alongside the cocaine, heroin, and American contraband."

"Bloody hell. And here I thought she was a sweet old dear."

"Your landlady once engaged in similar activities, I believe."

"It was her husband's…"

Mycroft smiled. "Of course, John. In any case, my suspicion paid off. Madame Palazuelos _did_ sell the information, which was given to _her_ by her son or daughter-in-law, both of whom worked at Guantanamo and both of whom, according to her, are now under threat from the Agency. It is even possible that they were acting under Knight's instructions. It is a rare Cuban who supports the Agency's activities here, and Knight – at least, the Knight I knew – had the ability to be very persuasive."

"Given that he worked for you, I'm not exactly surprised."

Mycroft didn't respond, though he looked rather smug.

"Right. So our next step is what, exactly?"

Mycroft frowned slightly, considering. "Returning to the hotel and replacing our clothing would be the most sensible option. We're drawing a certain amount of attention."

"Yeah, a bloke with a face like minced beef will do that."

"Don't exaggerate John. You lost a little blood, nothing more."

"I wasn't talking about me."

Mycroft ignored him. "Returning to the hotel might may well be sensible, but I'm wary of losing time. Madame Palazuelos will no doubt be sending a messenger to warn her son as we speak. If we want to find him, this is our best chance."

John pulled out his wallet and found the bloodied scrap of paper on which the old lady had scribbled the address. Mycroft took it from him with an expression of distaste.

"Less than an hour's walk away," he declared. "What do you think, shall we?"

John eyed him suspiciously. "You're enjoying this," he accused. " _Being Sherlock_. It's like a holiday for you."

Mycroft raised a supercilious eyebrow. "Don't be preposterous John."

"You are."

"I am not."

"Are too."

Mycroft sniffed. "Can't you do something about that blood?" he asked, waving a hand in John's general direction. "Tie your shirt around your waist or something."

"Trying to get my clothes off now?"

"Well, you _did_ accuse me of being insufficiently like Sherlock."

"Har-de-har."

Mycroft heaved a put-upon sigh. "Here," he said, shrugging himself out of his long coat. "Put this on."

"Are you insane? It's about 35 degrees out here!"

"Yes, it is a touch warm, isn't it? A shame you made such a mess of yourself."

John growled.

.

The afternoon was beginning to wane before they turned onto the rutted track that led to their quarry. They had washed at the first fountain they came across, which had done very little to restore their appearance, but had at least removed the more obvious signs of their recent spat. With Mycroft's long coat buttoned over John's stained shirt, they'd escaped the worst of the attention, though John was sweltering beneath the thick wool. How Mycroft had worn it around all morning without collapsing, he didn't know. Perhaps the Holmes family was part vampire.

Their apparent destination was a small dwelling, part-brick, part-timber, that stood alone off a narrow, un-sealed road. The land around had once been cultivated but had now run half-wild. Straggling stalks of self-sown maize grew in the fields beside the road, some towering over John's head, others leaning drunkenly. The house, when they reached it, was dark and silent, the shutters latched and doors locked tight. A line of washing stretched from a nail at the corner of the house to a cracked fence post; the clothes were sun-bleached, with the stiffness that came from many days of being soaked and dried again. If Carlo Palazuelos had ever been there, it looked as if he had long fled.

Mycroft walked slowly around the house, examining scuffed earth and faded curtains, dust and dirt and door frames, while John went to work on the lock. He'd carried a set of lock picks attached to his key-ring since he'd first moved in with Sherlock, along with a leatherman, a small LED torch, and a flint. They made his key-ring bulky as all hell, and it was a pain finding trousers with large enough pockets, but it was worth it. He was still carrying the whole bundle of them now, despite the fact that the keys in question fitted doors a hundred miles away.

It took him twenty-seven minutes of juggling before the lock clicked open. John was irritated; it was a simple lock, and Sherlock, he was pretty sure, could have done it in less than ten. He rose from the awkward kneeling position he'd been forced to adopt, rubbing the back of his neck. He was out of practice.

They didn't have to go far to find the reason for the house's air of abandonment. The bodies lay where they had fallen, the woman on the tiled floor of the kitchen and the man sprawled on an upright wooden chair at the table.

"Carlo and Maria?" John asked, not really needing the confirmation. Mycroft nodded.

"So it would seem."

John crouched to examine the woman. He could tell already that there was no need for caution – the murderers had been and gone.

"Four, maybe five days," he murmured, prodding gently at the dead abdomen.

"Five, I think."

The woman was young, perhaps no more than late twenties. Her hair was long and braided, and there were old calluses on her hands. The man was older, his stubble rather greying. His head was thrown backwards, neck exposed, and his hands hung limply at his sides. There was a grey sock on his left foot; the other lay crumpled at the base of the chair.

"Any theories?" John asked.

Mycroft raised an eyebrow. "You tell me. I thought you were the expert here."

John huffed.

"Both killed with a single shot to the head," he said, to gain time, though it hardly needed stating. "Pistol probably. Smallish calibre, can't tell what. No attempt to hide the bodies or cover it up, so whoever did it isn't concerned with being caught." He paused, considering. "So… CIA tracked them down then?"

"And made sure that Carlo here would no longer be in a position to reveal sensitive information, yes. Anything else?"

John frowned, scanning the room, trying to pick up on anything that might be significant. Then he blinked, the deduction fizzing suddenly and surprisingly in the forefront of his brain.

"Sherlock's been here!" he blurted.

Mycroft looked faintly impressed. "Very good, John." He tilted his head to one side, considering. "How did you know?"

John grinned.

"His socks," he said, indicating the man's body with a thumb. "One off, one on. All well and good. But the one on the floor is inside out, and his shoes are miles away, so he wasn't getting ready to go out. There's blood on the sock, quite a bit, but his foot's barely pink. Inference: someone removed the sock after he died." He grinned again. "Who else but Sherlock would remove a corpse's socks?"

Mycroft very nearly laughed. "Well done," he said. "Perhaps you are not quite so dim after all."

John frowned, but it wasn't in response to the faint praise.

"It doesn't really help us that much though, does it? Sherlock was here, but we don't know when or why, and we still don't know where he is now."

"He was last here two days ago," Mycroft said. "He came, as we did, looking for information, but found our friends here dead on arrival. He lay low here for three nights, planning his next move."

John wrinkled his nose at the thought of spending three nights in the same house as two increasingly malodourous corpses, but he didn't say anything. He knew Sherlock well enough to realise that such a detail would have scarcely crossed his mind.

"And," Mycroft continued, with a ferocious scowl, "Lacking as my _idiot_ brother apparently is in both practical intel and common sense, I think we can both deduce where he has now gone."

John winced. He'd known it was coming, but that didn't make hearing it any easier.

"Guantanamo?"

"Guantanamo."

Mycroft looked positively murderous. Letting Sherlock break into a top-security prison on his own had _not,_ it seemed, been part of the plan.

"So what, head back to the hotel and go after him then?" John asked, but Mycroft wasn't listening. He had taken two long strides towards a shelf by the door and pulled a folded piece of paper from beneath a mug with a broken handle. His expression, if possible, grew even grimmer.

"What's that?"

"Sherlock's idea of a joke, it would seem." His voice was soft and very, very cold. "We have an agreement, my brother and I. Whenever he takes something, whatever he takes, he writes a list."

He dropped the slip of paper into John's palm, and John, dry-mouthed, saw the intricate diagrams of a dozen chemicals annotated in Sherlock's most precise, most flourishing hand.

.

* * *

Sherlock, not uncharacteristically, had grown bored of waiting. He should have delayed until it was full dark, but his impatience had got the better of him. Now, he was half a mile off-shore in a small fishing boat whose erstwhile owner, he suspected, would be very, very unhappy come tomorrow morning. Sherlock had never rowed while at Cambridge, eschewing as he did anything even vaguely resembling a team sport, and Mycroft, of course, would sooner kiss Mrs Hudson than partake in any unnecessary physical activity, but Sherrinford had once rowed for Oxford and it was he who had taught Sherlock. It had been over the course of a summer holiday in Cornwall, during Sherlock's admittedly rather extended pirate phase. Sherlock had been nine, Sherrinford nearly twenty. Myc had been sixteen, still at school, and so horribly spotty that Sherlock had declared any ship containing him to be a plague vessel. Mycroft, to be fair, had taken it in reasonably good humour.

Sherlock pulled lazily at the oars, not in a hurry now that he had started at last. The evening was clear and warm, the first stars already starting to appear above him. The sky and sea were both inky black, and he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. With each pull of the oars the blades were briefly limned in green-gold. A trail of phosphorescent bubbles spun out away from the boat with every slow stroke.

Eventually, Sherlock shipped his oars and sat quiet. There was no sound but for the lap of water and the steady drip from the paddle blades. Unhurriedly, he removed his coat, shoes, socks, shirt, and trousers and stuffed them, not without difficulty, inside a heavy-duty plastic dry-bag. Punching the last of the air from it, he sealed the top of the bag and trussed it over his shoulders. He tossed the dinghy's small anchor stone over the side and felt the scrunch as it hit sand (a boat moored in the wrong place was less noticeable than a boat drifting with the tide – at least to everyone other than the vessel's owner).

With one last cursory glance to make sure he'd packed everything, Sherlock tightened the straps of the dry-bag, and dived.

His limbs were gilded instantly in a layer of phosphorescence. His hands, thrust out in front of him, were outlined suddenly in flame, and tiny, copper-coloured bubbles lay meshed in the hair on his arms. The water was warm as blood. He swam with long, steady strokes, lifting his head every fifty to sight the distant shoreline.

He had reasoned – accurately enough, as it seemed – that the mines, or whatever other security devices they employed, could not have been intended to guard against waterborne bodies. If they had been, the foreshore would have been littered with a smorgasbord of diced shark.

He crawled ashore with his belly dragging on the sand. There couldn't be motion sensors out here, not unless they wanted to set off an alarm with every stray dog. Even so, it took him twenty-three minutes to locate a surveillance camera fit for his purposes. To his immense irritation, he missed both his first and second shots. _'John wouldn't have missed',_ his mind grumbled, and Sherlock fiercely quelled it.

The third rock hit its target, smashing the camera off its axis so it pointed harmlessly at the ground. He waited, lying in the shallows on his belly, but no one came to investigate. _Strike one against the U.S. army._

Sherlock wasn't fool enough to tangle with the razor wire, nor with the thin, high-voltage lines suspended a foot beyond the fence. Instead, he unrolled the top of his dry-bag and removed a folded titanium snow shovel. Approaching the fence warily, he stepped into the space left by the now-absent beam of the security camera. He couldn't suppress a small sigh. Digging holes was John's forte, not his.

Fortunately for Sherlock, the elaborate security fence was built mostly on sand. There was a moral somewhere in that, but Sherlock didn't consider it worth the brain-space. All the same, digging was tedious. He fell into a routine, striking downwards, applying pressure, levering, tossing the sand away behind him, mindful not to let any of it escape the narrow space between the cameras. Even pretending to be digging for buried treasure didn't help all that much.

After a long, tedious hour, he had a hole deep enough to reach beneath the fence and wide enough for a thin man to wriggle through. He spread the excess sand about as well as he could, reluctant to draw undue attention to his burrowing. He considered for a moment filling the tunnel in after him, but decided on balance that he couldn't be bothered. Besides, it was always useful to have an emergency escape route. _'A sensible man would have planned a way out beforehand,'_ the John in his mind offered conversationally.

.

Sherlock had barely squirmed his way beneath the fence when a patrol came past, two soldiers with torches and unpleasant-looking rifles. Sherlock scrambled towards the camp, barely managing to throw himself behind an out-building as the torch beams swept past. ' _Idiots',_ he thought, with satisfaction.

It took him longer than he would have liked to find an unlocked building. The one he ended up in appeared to be a scullery of some kind, attached to a large and cavernous kitchen; the adjoining door was securely bolted, so Sherlock had to make do. There was an old stone sink whose taps, when twisted, yielded a thin trickle of ferrous water. Hurriedly, he splashed his belly and thighs, scrubbing fiercely to remove the worst of the sand. He grimaced. The curls of hair beneath his navel were thick with the ghastly stuff.

As rapidly as he could, Sherlock flipped open the top of his bag and pulled on his coat. It stuck horribly to his wet skin, but a man wearing a long coat over bare legs was still less likely to be noticed than a man wearing his underpants and eight pounds of sand.

It was at this point that Sherlock discovered a flaw in his planning. In all the items he had considered essential to an infiltration of one of the most heavily-guarded military bases of all time, neither a towel nor a pair of dry pants were among them. He plucked mournfully at his damp pants and wasted another twenty seconds fruitlessly wishing for John. John remembered things like pants.

The sound of voices and the scuffle of feet outside snapped Sherlock out of his self-pity. He dug through the bag until he located his socks and pulled them hastily on. He laid his shoes out next to him, ready to step into if he got the slightest indication that he was about to be interrupted. It was a curious facet of human condescension that people _always_ noticed bare feet before anything else, even on a man who was dripping seawater and practically naked beneath his coat.

He vacillated a moment more over his pants. ' _Which'll it be, genius? Wet crotch or commando?'_ John sounded amused.

In the end, the sound of approaching footsteps made his mind up for him. He grabbed his trousers from the bag, pulled them on, and stuffed his feet hastily into his shoes while fastening his fly. Just as the latch of the door rattled, he shoved his bag out of sight behind a rubbish bin and wrapped his coat about his chest. The door opened.

The bulky lieutenant who stood there had clearly not expected to find a man hiding out in a scullery. He blinked in surprise, torch beam playing over Sherlock's face, mouth open in astonishment.

"Who the bloody hell are you?" he asked.

.

* * *

.

 **A/N:** I've been wanting to write that scene for aaaages. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you! Next up: John has to face Mary, and Molly discovers something interesting.


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen

.

With a casual movement, Sherlock drew his coat tighter about him, the better to mask his bare chest. He could do nothing about the dripping hair and untied shoelaces but, fortunately for him, other people were idiots.

"Oh, heeey!" he said, his speech several octaves higher and rather more American-sounding than usual. "I'm guessing this isn't the way to the mess hall, huh?"

He gave a gormless sort of titter, treating his interlocutor to an inane, rather toothy smile. The lieutenant's death-glare relaxed somewhat, but he didn't lower the rifle.

"Hey, you mind pointing that thing somewhere else? Stuff that can kill me kinda freaks me out a bit, y'know?"

The soldier grunted, his eyes narrowed. "You some kinda lawyer?"

"Naw, photographer. Got mah ID somewhere here." He fumbled in the pocket of his coat, and handed over a laminated card on a lariat. "Charlie Wilkinson, Associated Press."

"And what the fuck are you're doing in here?" the solider growled, unappeased.

"Aw, I'm here covering the trial, yeah? Was meant to meet this guy at the mess hall. Captain Forrest. Maybe you know him?"

"This facility is restricted, you fucking dumbass."

"Aw well, shit. Ahm sorry, man."

"How'd you even get through the gate?"

"Aw, there was some guys comin' through in a truck from the other compound. I just hitched a ride with them."

"And I suppose you can't tell me _who_ it was who was dumb enough to let a fucking journo in?"

"Sorry man. It was a coupl'a guys. Been on the piss a little bit, y'know? Think the kid driving was called Jezza... Maybe Gazza? Reckoned he knew where I'd find that guy Forrest. Hey, any chance you can point me in the right direction?"

"Like fuck, you piece of journo shit. I'm taking you back to your tent and you're gonna bloody stay there, or you'll be on the next plane home. You got that, _man_?"

Sherlock allowed himself to be grabbed by the bicep and manhandled towards the door. He managed to snag his rucksack on the way past, mumbling about camera equipment. The soldier made an irritated noise and tightened the bruising grip on his arm. Sherlock was frog-marched from the room and out into the compound again. At the nearest gate, he was handed over to a pair of sentries and bundled into a jeep. The drive lasted 26 minutes and passed through two checkpoints along the way, at each of which he was insulted, manhandled, and roundly abused. He adopted an appropriately penitent expression and let it skim over him. Finally, the jeep shuddered to a halt in one of the outermost compounds where, Sherlock knew from his surveillance, the lawyers, press, and other civilians were accommodated. A final gate was unlocked and slammed behind him and a final volley of abuse fired. Outwardly contrite, Sherlock slunk off down the long row of white tents.

He was in.

.

* * *

Dusk had long since fallen and the evening was well advanced by the time John and Mycroft made it back to the vicinity of their hotel. The closer they got, the more John's feet seemed to drag. He didn't know how to face Mary. He wasn't even sure that he wanted to.

Mycroft, in that uncanny Holmesian way, seemed to divine what John was thinking.

"Mary did not tell the Agency that we were coming, John," he said abruptly, interrupting John's thoughts. "Her loyalty to them was wavering before ever we left London."

"She was still giving them information though," John mumbled. "By her own admission, she was still prepared to shoot you."

Mycroft frowned, not as if the thought of his own assassination was a perturbing one, merely contemplative.

"Not for a while now, I think. She got in too deep. She _cared_ too much for her new life. She justified it to herself with the thought that we were seeking Sherlock only, not endeavouring to tangle with her masters. But from the moment she left England with you and yet kept her silence, I had wondered."

"I think you're wrong," John said quietly. "I'd like to believe you, but… They _were_ warned, by someone. Those soldiers yesterday were looking for me. They knew my name."

"They were warned by someone, I agree. But not, I think, by Mary. The Agency knew that we were coming, yes – and not just any old team sent to round up rogue agents, but _we specifically_. But – and this is the crucial point – they did not know when or where. Why tell them part, and yet withhold the specifics?"

John frowned. Mycroft's argument made a certain kind of sense, and yet –

"Besides," Mycroft continued, "You were all under surveillance before you left Europe, and _not_ by the Americans. That argues for communication between the Service and the Agency – and not just communication, but _collaboration._ Collaboration of which I was unaware, and no hint of which has ever passed my desk."

John looked up, his interest caught.

"All of which suggests a traitor," he filled in, following Mycroft's reasoning. "High-level, too."

"Precisely. Whether the Americans are pursing us at the direction of my own people or whether it's the other way around, I couldn't say, but it's rather a moot point in any case."

"You mean 'either way we look at it we've still got both MI6 and the CIA out for our blood'? That sort of moot point?"

"Mm. Something along those lines, yes."

"We're fucked."

"Oh, I don't think so. Not yet."

"So who is it then? This traitor who has a special interest in keeping Sherlock out of Guantanamo?"

"Genius though I may be, John, I can hardly confirm that from here. Not that I don't have my suspicions."

John frowned. The idea that Mary hadn't sold them out was reassuring, in its way, but if it had been Anthea or one of Mycroft's people they were hardly any better off.

.

When they were two blocks out from the hotel, they separated. Mycroft loitered unobtrusively in a nearby square while John hastened onwards, chewing his lip in an agony of indecision.

He still hadn't worked out what to think as he fitted his room key into the old-fashioned lock. It was only the thought of what Mycroft would say if he came back to find John vacillating in the corridor that convinced him to turn the key and slip inside.

The sight that greeted him was one of the strangest he could have imagined.

Molly, Greg and Irene Adler were lined up against the far wall, each levelling a large and serious-looking firearm in his general direction. Mary, standing at Greg's shoulder, appeared to be in the middle of dispensing tips. Billie, meanwhile, was standing naked in the middle of the room, jigging about in a sort of dance and chewing messily on a rusk. She squealed at the sight of John and made an un-coordinated dash for the open doorway, her little feet stamping and her face split in a toothy grin.

"Dadadadadada!"

John shut the door hastily.

"Hello Bilbo," he said, endeavouring simultaneously to remove his coat and prevent her from climbing his leg.

Mary gasped.

"John! Oh my god. What happened?"

"Christ!" Greg swore.

Belatedly, John remembered that he was covered in blood from neck to groin. Before he could do anything sensible about it, the woman who he still wasn't sure he was speaking to had an arm around his back and was pressing him down into a chair, her hands fumbling with the buttons of his shirt. He winced as a cold palm found his skin.

"Calm down," he told her shortly, batting the hands away. "It was a nosebleed for god's sake."

Mary slumped in relief, her sleek head bowed and her hands still pressed against his sides. The sight of her kneeling at his feet, so obviously grateful, made him feel uncomfortable; he forced his way out of the chair as quickly as he could.

"What about Mycroft?" Greg asked, sounding worried. "Where is he?"

"He's fine. I left him lurking a couple of blocks away. He should be here in half an hour at most."

John stepped around them all, dodged Billie's attempt to trip him, and grabbed the towel he'd left lying across the end of the bed.

"Now if you lot don't mind, I need a wash."

He ducked quickly into the bathroom and locked the door before any of them could think to follow him.

.

Once safely barricaded in, John turned both taps on as full as they would go and began to fill the chipped enamel tub. A bath was a bit of a luxury, generally speaking, but he rather thought he'd earned it. Catching sight of his reflection in the mirror forced him to conclude that the others hadn't been entirely unjustified in their reaction. He looked a mess. The blood had soaked right through his shirt, and his chest and belly were stained pink. There was a thick clump of the stuff caught in the hair around his navel that would probably be hell to shift by any means short of waxing. Beneath the blood, his torso was heavily bruised. He poked speculatively at a purplish patch over his ribs and winced. That was going to hurt, come tomorrow. His hasty wash in the fountain hadn't done much for his face, either. The bridge of his nose was swollen, and he hadn't been entirely successful at removing the blood from his chin.

Strangely though, John felt good. Oh yeah, he'd be in bloody agony tomorrow morning, but at the moment, he felt… well, a little smug actually. He hadn't had time to count, but there had been at least a dozen blokes trying to kill him earlier in the day, and here he was with barely a scratch. Nothing worth writing home about, at any rate. He flexed his knuckles. Mycroft was a better hitter than John had ever given him credit for either. They could use a bit of work on their communication, maybe, but all in all, John was pretty happy.

He splashed a bit of water from the sink over his face and chest, aiming to get the worst of the blood off rather than sitting in pink bathwater all evening. He stripped off his clothes and stepped into the tub, not even trying to repress his grin. He hadn't been in a proper fight since Sherlock had left.

.

There was a snick from the bathroom lock, and the door opened. Mary stepped inside and shut it behind her, twirling one of John's lock picks between her fingers. John scowled. He must have left them in the pocket of Mycroft's coat.

Mary reached for the buttons of her blouse and began shedding clothes, the tiniest, taunting sway to her movements. She kept her eyes on John's, a flirty twist to her grin. John glowered.

"What are you doing in here? Can't a bloke wash in peace?"

"Mm. Not when he comes home all lovely and sweaty and covered in blood and lets me tear off his shirt buttons."

John snorted. "Got a thing for blood, have you?"

She turned to face him, grinning, and licked her lower lip. "Only _your_ blood."

"Comforting."

Mary stepped out of her underwear and into the tub, settling herself between John's legs. The water lapped dangerously over the sides, but didn't overflow. She ran her fingers up the side of his neck and leaned in to nip his earlobe.

"It is a bit sexy though."

John grunted. "You seem very sure of your reception."

"That's because I know what you like."

She kissed his jaw and John turned his head in protest; but it was a token one, and they both knew it. In truth, he was struggling to stay angry with her. The sight of her obvious distress had softened him, and the hot water relaxing his muscles had done the rest. Her hands on his skin reminded him how long it had been since he'd let himself be comforted.

"Where's Bilbo?"

"With Greg. He promised to feed her and get her to sleep. I wish him luck with it. She hasn't gone down before ten since we got off the plane."

"Mm. To be fair, he probably has a better chance than anyone else."

"There is that. God, I can't begin to imagine what she'll be like when she discovers boys."

She kissed his neck again, and John sighed, capitulating.

"Why can't I stay mad at my nasty, lying, duplicitous wife?"

"Mm. Because I'm sexy. And because I just spent six hours drilling a bunch of clueless muppets in the use of firearms for the sake of your mad best friend."

John snorted. "So how'd they do, coach?"

"So-so. Greg knows his stuff, but he's got some sort of hang-up about actually firing the thing and he won't relax – and even if he does, he can't aim for pants. Irene's got better aim, but her handling's rubbish. Weirdly enough, Molly's pretty good."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Much better than I expected. Good hands and a good eye."

"I suppose she _is_ a pathologist. What were you shooting anyway?"

"Some rather nifty little toys that Mycroft brought in. Handguns and mid-range rifles, semi-auto, and modified to take tranq darts."

"Quiet?"

"As the grave. Lovely action. Wherever he gets his budget from, they hate him less than most people do."

John snorted. "He's not using his budget. He's currently A.W.O.L., remember?"

One of Mary's hands slid up the side of his neck and into his hair. John sighed. He pulled her hand away and repositioned her so she was leaning back against his chest.

"I _am_ mad at you," he said quietly.

"I know," Mary said, sounding subdued. Her persistent hands faltered, falling slack against his thighs.

John exhaled. With her shoulders tensed and her head tilted down away from him, Mary suddenly seemed very small.

John raised a hand and threaded tentative fingers through the hair at the nape of her neck.

"It's mostly because I had to hear it from Mycroft," he admitted.

He stroked the base of her head softly, admiring the many-shaded gold of her hair: dyed, he knew, but still beautiful.

"The thing is…" he said softly, "it's probably not healthy or anything… but once you've forgiven someone for shooting your best friend, anything else seems like a bit of a minor detail."

Mary chuckled weakly. "And yet I somehow manage to restrain myself from treating that as a free pass."

John reached around and flicked water at her. Mary grabbed his hand and kissed it.

"For the record, I _am_ sorry about that." She tangled their fingers together and squeezed.

"I didn't even really mean to do it, you know," she said, after a moment. "I just... panicked somehow. All I could think was that he knew, and he was going to tell you."

And there it was: the thing that they never talked about, the questions they never voiced. John stilled, his muscles tensing and his breath against her neck almost noiseless.

"And that's all it was?" he asked, voice low. "A mistake? You swear it?"

Mary hesitated. It was only a moment, but long enough that he began to draw back. She grasped at him, holding him in place.

"It _was_ a mistake. I promise you that. But also maybe… just the tiniest bit of jealousy."

John inhaled sharply through his nose. His hand contracted around Mary's fingers, and let go.

"You thought I was shagging him?" he asked, in a low, tightly-wound voice.

"No. Not that. I knew you hadn't. But he – the way he just _lit you up_ , so easily, like I'd never seen before. And then… he made my life – everything – so much more difficult, just by being there. You have no idea..."

"So you thought you'd take the opportunity when you had it?" John growled.

"I don't know what I was thinking. That's what threw my aim. I just – at the last minute… My brain kind of kicked in."

"Christ." John pulled his hand away, but only to place it back on her shoulder. He bowed his head against her crown.

"So all that bullshit he span about it being 'surgery'…"

"I don't know why he said that. I… Why did he push so hard for you to come back to me?"

John swallowed, but didn't answer for a moment. His hands resumed their motion, roving absently over Mary's shoulders and across the span of her back.

"I think it was because of Bill'," he mumbled at last. "He knew how much I wanted to be a dad."

Mary twisted and wrapped her arms about him, pressing her face beneath his chin in a wordless hug.

They lay like that for a long time. Idly, John picked up the soap and worked a lather into his hands, running them gently over her arms and breasts.

"Did you really never look at the files I gave you?" Mary asked, after awhile.

John shook his head.

"I gave the memory stick to Sherlock. I didn't want to know… but I didn't want to _not_ know. I told him to read them and tell me what I should do."

"And he was ok with that?"

"He said he _wasn't in the habit of acting as other people's conscience_ ," John quoted. "But he's also the nosiest bugger on the face of the planet. He couldn't resist."

Mary snorted, half-amused, half-miserable.

"He told me that, by his reckoning, there was nothing on there that I'd think was worse than shooting him. I remember, because his phrasing was so particular: not that there _wasn't_ anything worse… just nothing that _I'd_ think was worse. Humble, he is not."

Mary chuckled weakly, sniffing back the tears that threatened to spring to her eyes. John shifted away from her a little and poured shampoo into his palm. He spread it between his hands and began to card his fingers softly through her hair.

"Tell me something?" he asked, after awhile.

"Mm?"

"What colour was your hair? Before, I mean."

Mary hesitated. "I thought you didn't want to know about it... me."

John sighed. "It's not going to go away though, is it? And I thought… Well, I guess we might as well start with something easy."

Mary smiled.

"Brown," she told him. "A bit lighter than Molly's I suppose. Kind of mousy really."

"Wow. I can't tell."

"No. I touch up the roots practically every week." She faltered a moment, then grinned. John could hear the smile in her voice. "I used to shave it though."

"What, seriously?"

Mary laughed aloud at the amazement in his tone.

"Uh huh. I even had a mohawk for awhile."

"A mohawk. God, I can't even picture it."

She laughed again, a note of devilry creeping back into her voice. "Yup. I used to wear it that way to um… show off my tattoo."

"You _what_?" His hands fell back into the bathwater with a loud splash. A miniature wave slopped over the rim of the bath and onto the floor.

"Tattoo. I've got one. It curves right around here." She raised a hand and drew a long, shallow arc above her left ear.

" _Seriously_? You have a secret skull tattoo that I've never even noticed?"

"Mm. Lucky I have thick hair."

John tilted her head sideways, scraping at her soapy blonde hair with his fingertips, trying to gather it out of the way.

"God, you're right. I can see the colour. Wait, what's it a tattoo of?"

She demurred playfully. "Mm… Don't know if I should tell you."

"Come on! You have to tell me. That's completely unfair!"

She laughed aloud at his outrage.

"Alright, alright. It's a dragon, ok."

John's indignation collapsed into a shout of laughter. "A _dragon_? Seriously?"

"Hey, it's a _cool_ dragon."

He snorted, amused. "Uh huh."

"Alright, I was nineteen and stupid, ok? At least _I_ never had a hideous grey moustache."

.

John stood at the open window, gazing out at the scattered lights of the town. He was dressed for sleep, in a white t-shirt over blue cotton boxers. Leaning in the doorway of the bathroom, combing the tangles from her hair, Mary watched him. His shoulders were relaxed, head tilted slightly downwards. In the absence of his usual jumpers, John looked neat and trim. There was a softness to his outline that spoke of walks in the park and Chinese takeaways and comfortable evenings by the fire, but no sign of the beer-belly that afflicted so many men his age. His arms were bulky and his hands were broad. There was a long ridge of muscle either side of his spine, not gym-sculpted, but _functional_. Aside from the streaks of grey in his hair, he could have been the man of twenty-nine who had first walked out of an army hospital in Birmingham and into the life of Sherlock Holmes.

The night air was sultry and still. Tiny beads of sweat glinted at the nape of John's neck, just beneath his hairline. His white shirt was already damp between the shoulder blades.

He had no idea, Mary thought, just how attractive he was.

She had just made up her mind to walk over there and jump him, when he spoke.

"In the interests of full disclosure," he said quietly. "I should tell you something."

He didn't turn to face her, eyes still fixed on the lights beyond the window. Mary took a half step forward to indicate that she was listening.

"Billie's name," John said. "The reason I wanted to call her that. It's short for William."

Mary nodded, though he couldn't see her, and stepped closer, laying a hand against his shoulder blade. Beneath her palm the muscle tremored faintly.

"I guessed as much," she told him softly. "For Bill Murray?"

John laughed a little, surprised. "I never even thought of him… Though I suppose, now that you mention it, it sort of fits."

Mary frowned.

"If not Bill, then who?"

John swallowed.

"Sherlock," he said thickly, and so quietly that she almost didn't catch it. "It's Sherlock's first name."

.

* * *

.

 **A.N.** Hello lovely people. I am immensely sorry for the delay between chapters and can only hope that you haven't forgotten me yet! This chapter ended up being a monster and needed to be cut in half, so no Molly this time round (sorry fans). She and Greg get their moment next chapter, I promise! Hope you've all been enjoying the season four previews as much as I have. More soon!


	18. Chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen

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Hardly daring to breathe, Greg laid Billie down in her travel cot. Her nose scrunched a little and she kicked gently with one foot, but didn't wake.

"She out then?" Molly asked, raising an eyebrow. Greg blew out a breath.

"Think so. Hopefully."

"Well done. Greg Lestrade, Babysitting Superhero."

Greg snorted. "Yeah, well. I owe John, innit?"

"For what?"

"For all the times he's babysat my consultant."

Molly laughed. "Pretty sure he would've done that anyway."

She was on the bed in their shared hotel room with Mycroft's laptop propped on her knees. Her hair was damp from the shower and she was wearing flannelette pyjamas. They weren't entirely awful. There were no hearts, no humorous slogans, no cutesy cartoon kitties. They were just pyjamas – pale blue, dotted with tiny sprigs of flowers. They were the sort of thing his wife might have worn.

"So what's new in the world of facebook?" Greg asked.

"Mm. Done with facebook. Writing a blog entry now."

"John's?"

"Yeah. Everything you need to know about Russian architecture in ten easy clichés. Oh, and I told everyone that you've got food poisoning from a dodgy prawn cocktail."

"Thanks, I think."

"No problem. Actually, according to facebook, today's John and Mary's wedding anniversary."

Greg winced. "Ouch."

"Yes. Though fortunately I don't think either of them remembered." Molly paused, tilting her head in the direction of the Watsons' room. "Do you think they're ok?"

Greg shrugged. "He hasn't kicked her out yet, and they're not yelling."

"I still don't understand how she could do something like that," Molly said, frowning. "How could she marry John and be friends with all of us, and be stealing information on Sherlock's brother the whole time?"

Greg shrugged again. "I do get it, sort of. I've known people like that before. They decide they want to get clean, get back on the rails or whatever, get invested in a new life somewhere. But if you've spent your whole life being a criminal it can just be… hard to break the mould I guess. Y'know?"

"Mm. Maybe. But still…"

For a moment, Greg considered going over there and sitting with her, but he wasn't quite sure what message that would send. He stayed where he was.

"Did you know?" Molly asked hesitantly.

"God, no. That is – I sort of guessed that she was involved in Sherlock getting shot. Something I overheard John say. And the timing of that massive fight they had, when he moved back to Baker Street… I wondered. But that she was C.I.A.? Not a clue."

Molly tucked her chin down against her chest, her hair slipping forward over her face. She had laid aside the laptop and curled her arms around her knees.

He wanted to walk over there, stroke the hair back from her face and kiss her, but something held him back. Instead, he leaned awkwardly against the wall and stuffed his hands further into his pockets. His right hand encountered his mobile and, for something to do, he pulled it out and fiddled with the screen. It had been awhile since he'd turned it on, and there were a dozen messages waiting. Automatically, he slid his thumb over the inbox icon.

"Sally" - 06/05/16, 07.32pm: _Hey smelly. Girls missed you at training today. :-P Have a fab trip. So jealous!_

"Sally" - 10/05/16, 03.14pm: _Hey boss. I just got lumped with all your bloody paperwork for the coutts and dennis case coz you're still faffing about on holiday. What gives?_

"Sally" - 11/05/16, 09.44am: _Oi, you pillock, when are you getting home?_

"David F." - 11/05/16, 10.17am: _Lestrade I thnk I shd tell u that donovan is thrwing her wt around a lot. Pulld me off ross case & filed a complaint bcoz she says I contaminatd evidnce, & I thnk u'll find its not jst me. There is defnitly lots of ill-feeling twrds hr. _

"Annie" - 11/05/16, 06.14pm: _How come the boys are at Andy and Jo's? Why didn't you tell me? They could have stayed with me, but I didn't even know you were on leave till I saw your mum at brett's party - felt pretty stupid. Thanks for that. When are you back?_

 _"Fatboy" –_ 12/05/16, 11.27am: _Thought I should warn u annie called yesterday. She didn't seem 2 happy. Looks like sum1s in TROUBLE! lol_

"Sally" - 13/05/16, 02.22pm: _Seriously boss, call me._

"Fatboy" - 16/05/16, 10.25pm: _Oi, bro, answer ur damn phone. Didn't agree to keep ur kids 4ever u know! When r u coming 2 pick them up again? :-p_

"Sally" - 16/06/16, 10.28pm: _Greg, you ok? Haven't heard from you in awhile._

"Sally" - 17/06/16, 07.49pm: _Look, you muppeting piece of arse, I bloody need your help. I've got four murders, a vanishing diplomat, and a death by intoxication that's dodgy as fuck but there's no evidence. I'm only asking for ten minutes out of your sodding mediterranean cruise holiday, you bloody great twat. Call me? Please? Xx Sal._

He snorted a laugh, switching the phone back off again before he could be tempted to reply. Mycroft had been pretty firm on that point. Even reading the things was probably cause for Holmesian scowling and insults to his intelligence – which was one of the very good reasons Greg didn't intend on telling him.

"What's so amusing?" Molly asked.

"My inbox. Sally seems to be doing her nut running around trying to do my job for me."

"I can't say I'm sorry. She's not exactly nice to you most of the time."

Greg shrugged a little awkwardly. "Ah, she's ok. More bark than bite really."

In truth, Sally was one of his closer friends. She had a foul mouth, was liberal in her use of catty nicknames, enjoyed winding people up, and had a love life that was far too complicated for her own good, but he was fond of her. She'd drop everything and drive halfway across town if he ever needed her, and had proven it on more than one occasion.

"Sounds like she's just got stuck with a bunch of nasty cases," he offered, a little lamely. "She's actually quite –"

"Greg," Molly interrupted. "Have a look at this."

She'd picked up the laptop again while Greg had been reading messages, and now she indicated the screen with her tilted chin. Awkwardly, Greg made his way over and perched on the edge of the bed beside her.

The laptop screen showed a page from John's blog – the entry that Molly had been typing, accompanied by a photo of Mary, Greg, Molly and Billie in front of the Winter Palace. Greg blinked.

"When did you get so good at photoshopping?"

Molly flushed. "Um… When I was about fourteen and used to stick myself into pictures with Leonardo DiCaprio actually."

Greg choked. "Seriously?"

"'Fraid so. But that's not what I wanted you to look at. Here –" she motioned to one of the comments. Under the uninformative username 'sKukzz16' was a link containing a bad photo of Mycroft and the comment ' _a case for the great detective?'_

They exchanged a frown, and Greg shrugged. Molly clicked the link.

The page redirected to a video on the BBC news site. A middle-aged presenter sat behind a desk, speaking rapidly into the camera:

 _"New Scotland Yard confirmed today that there has been no progress in the case of missing British diplomat Edward Ellis._ "

Behind him, the hugely magnified photo of Mycroft flashed up on the screen. It was a very bland, office-standard photograph of a man in a business suit, taken in poor lighting and rather pixelated. It showed a considerably younger Mycroft, his hair thicker and more reddish, his face less lined. If she hadn't known it was him, Molly would have struggled to make the connection.

 _"Mr Ellis, an undersecretary at the foreign office, was last seen eighteen days ago when he boarded a plane from Heathrow. The home office confirmed today that his destination was not New York City, as previously stated, but North Korea. The North Korean regime under Kim Jong-Un is notoriously secretive, but officials released a statement_ _today in which they claimed that Mr Ellis has never entered Pyongyang. The case is being overseen by Detective Sally Donovan of New Scotland Yard:"_

The video cut to a mid-shot of Sally's face. In the background, they could make out one of the yard's conference rooms.

 _"Mr Ellis was last seen boarding a flight at Heathrow on May the first,"_ Sally's voice reported. " _His assistant has stated that his intended destination was New York City. He was not reported missing until late on Friday, twelve days after the last sighting at Heathrow. The investigation by Scotland Yard is ongoing, and we are in consultation with MI6. We are now in a position to confirm that Mr Ellis did not arrive in New York, and we have reason to believe that he is currently in North Korea. In light of this, his disappearance is now being treated as suspicious. Owing to the generosity of Lady Jessica Carlisle, considerable private funds have been made available for the search. Government agents under the direction of MI6 are currently on Mr Ellis's trail, and we have reason to believe that his life may be in danger. We ask any members of the public who may have information regarding his movements over the last eighteen days to come forward."_

The video cut to black.

.

* * *

"Oh, _good girl,_ " Mycroft breathed.

Greg frowned. "Sorry?"

They were in Mycroft and Irene's room, the laptop open on Molly's knees and the other three clustered behind her. Molly paused the video on the image on Sally Donovan's scowling face.

Mycroft, oddly, looked pleased.

"My assistant, Miss Grey. This has her clever little fingers all over it. _Government agents on the trail… Reason to believe my life is in danger._ It's a warning."

Greg blinked. "Um… Not that reassuring, actually.

"And nothing we didn't know," Irene pointed out drily.

"Untrue. We know that the Service and the Agency have allied against us, something which was mere supposition until now. We know that Miss Grey suspects Lady Carlisle of orchestrating events – a guess, certainly, but a good one, I think. Perhaps most importantly, we know now that we have an ally – _two,_ rather: my assistant, and your Sergeant Donovan." He nodded at Greg.

"Vanishing diplomat," Greg muttered.

"I'm sorry?"

"Sally. She said she had a case with a vanishing diplomat. It struck me as weird because it's not normally our division."

"Seems like she tells you a lot," Molly mumbled.

Greg shot her a look, noting her pinkened cheeks. "Ah. I guess…"

"I do hope Anthea knows what she's doing," Irene remarked. "I don't imagine that Lady Carlisle will be especially pleased, do you?"

Mycroft frowned.

"Let us hope that they do not pay too dearly for their boldness."

.

* * *

Back in their own room, Greg prepared for bed, the full awkwardness of the situation striking him anew. He shut himself in the tiny bathroom to change, half-hoping that Molly would be asleep by the time he emerged. Briefly, he contemplated nipping down to the bar again, but supposed that it would be a little too obvious an avoidance tactic. It wasn't that he didn't like Molly: the trouble was that he did.

Molly was already beneath the covers, a book balanced between hand and pillow. If asked, Greg would've expected it to be something lurid and girly with a brooding, tight-shirted hero on the front cover. Instead, she was reading _All Quiet on the Western Front._ He didn't know what to think about that.

Half-heartedly, he wondered if he could get away with sleeping on top of the covers again, but that would probably lead to awkward questions. He shuffled himself into the free side of the bed, trying not to think about the way Annie used to press her cold toes against his calves and reach under his shirt to warm her hands on his belly; about the way her breasts had felt pressed against his spine, or the way he'd ended up with a face full of long, sweet-smelling brown hair every time she turned over.

"Are you ok?" Molly asked.

"What? Yeah, I'm fine."

"It's just – I thought you might be worried about Sally."

"Oh. Well. Guess I am a bit. She's a tough cookie though, she'll be alright."

"So are you two, um…"

It took Greg a moment to work out what she was asking.

"What? Me and – no! God, she'd probably kill me."

"Right, sorry." It might have been his imagination, but he thought Molly sounded a little happier.

"I just thought – well, you seem close."

"Yeah, no. I mean, we're friends, but _just_ friends. Like John and Sherlock." He paused. "Actually on second thought, forget that. That was a really bad example."

Molly giggled.

"I'm glad," she said. And then, taking a deep breath: "Because – well – you might've guessed. But I really like you Greg."

Greg was mortified to find himself flushing furiously. "Um, yep. Kinda gathered that. A bit."

Molly giggled again. "You know, I'm not an expert or anything, but usually guys make some sort of reciprocal statement round about now."

"Oh, right. Well, yeah. I do too, obviously."

Molly exhaled in relief.

"Thank god for that," she said.

And then, somehow, she was kissing him, and Greg was lying flat on his back with a woman's slight weight pressing him down for the first time in – God – years. Molly's mouth was warm and gentle and her skin was softer than silk, and her little hands were creeping up under his t-shirt in exactly the way that Annie's used to. He shuddered, pushing the thought aside. Molly seemed to take the shiver as encouragement, for she tugged the t-shirt up beneath his arms until he raised himself enough for her to draw it over his head. Her hands roamed over his torso, kneading at the muscles in his chest and biceps, and he felt her grin against his mouth.

He was ashamed at the strength of his own reaction. He found himself tugging at Molly's clothing, bypassing the buttons of her pyjama top completely to tear it off over her head. The body revealed beneath it was slim and smooth and young, her skin creamy and supple, almost girlish. She was even tinier than he'd thought, so tiny that his hands almost circled her waist. Narrow hips; shallow belly-button; small, pert breasts, like Annie's had been before the boys were born. She laughed aloud at his apparent awe, leaning down to kiss him again, and their faces were curtained in long, sweet-smelling brown hair. He shivered again, bucking involuntarily against her; and God, the crotch of her pyjamas was wet already and his boxers were wet too, and how had that even happened?

Molly's hands were fumbling between them, fighting to rid him of his shorts, her efforts made more difficult by the way their hips had fused tight, him pressed half inside of her already. And God, this wasn't him. Greg Lestrade didn't _do_ things like this, had never in his life jumped straight from stumbling declarations to all out sex within a matter of moments, without even dinner or a bunch of roses or a movie. But Molly was rocking into him, her tongue curling against his own, little mewling noises rising from her throat. And Greg was abruptly, physically aware of the fact that it had been years, actual _years_ since he'd had this, and his brain was almost overwhelmed in the rush of testosterone, the fierce temptation to do what he wanted to for once in his life and to hell with the consequences...

And then, quite as suddenly, he knew he couldn't do it. All of the reasons he had listed to John came back to him in a rush, and Christ, what in hell had he been thinking?

"Mol," he murmured, pulling away from her. "Molly, stop. This is a bad idea."

Molly raised her head, her eyes wide, her face falling already into lines of distress.

"What do you mean?"

Her mouth was very pink, and her cheeks were flushed. Greg looked away.

"It's…" he stumbled over the words, and he raised his hands to her upper arms, rubbing gently but with inherent warning. "Look… I like you. I do. But we can't just do this. _I_ can't."

He sighed, and sat up, putting a little space between them. Molly wrapped her arms about herself, flushing now with self-consciousness, and Greg felt guilt strike at him, hot and hard and bitter.

"Mol," he said again, softly. "You have to understand, I'm not – I can't be a one night stand kind of guy. I just can't. Look… If you want to do this… If you _really_ want to, then there are things we'd need to talk about – work, and my kids, and my ex-wife, and – well – the Sherlock thing, and the age difference, and where you even see this going..."

Molly looked down at him. Her face was pinched with resignation, but she wasn't crying.

"Ok," she said. "So we go slow. It's not a problem, Greg. I can do that."

But Greg was shaking his head.

"I don't want to lead you on," he said seriously, and realised as he said it that it was the absolute truth. "You're too good a friend for that. And it's not the time to be starting something when we're on the wrong side of the world chasing after Sherlock bloody Holmes."

"Ok," Molly said, in a small voice. Her hands clutched once at his waist, and fell lax. "Ok, I get it."

She slipped off him, her face turned slightly away. She found her pyjama jacket, half inside-out and twisted around the buttons. Her hands shook as she righted the fabric, the flush rising up her neck the longer she struggled. Eventually, she managed to pull it over her head, arms fighting through the tangled sleeves. He caught one last glimpse of her breasts, lifted by the stretch of her arms, before the fabric covered them once more.

"I'm sorry."

"It's ok. Really."

"I wish I hadn't –"

"No, it's fine. You're probably right. It's my fault anyway."

"It's _not_ your fault," Greg told her fiercely. Guilt rose in his throat like bile. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and press his face against her hair. "And I'm not saying no, ok? I'm just saying I want to think about it."

Molly nodded, her chin trembling. There were still two spots of colour high on her cheekbones, and her eyes were over-bright.

Greg cleared his throat. He swung his feet off the side of the bed and bent down to pick up his t-shirt.

"I'm going to have a shower, then I'm going to go and get one of the others to switch rooms with me, ok?"

Molly nodded tightly in answer.

He paused in the doorway of the bathroom, feeling wretched, yet unable to think of any better course of action.

"I am sorry, Mol."

"Yeah. I know."

"Who do you want, Irene or Mycroft?"

Molly gave a choked sort of sniffle. "Honestly?"

Greg's mouth twitched in an awkward smile. "Not much of a choice, I know."

"I can definitely think of better room mates." She gave him a wan smile.

Greg turned away, his hand on the bathroom door.

"Greg?" Her face was still flushed, but her voice was low and steady.

"Yeah?"

She hesitated.

"Nothing. Sorry."

He tilted his head in her direction and nodded, just once. Then he stepped through into the bathroom and pulled the door to behind him.

.

* * *

.

 **A/N:** I know, I know, I'm so mean to poor Molly... I can only promise that it'll all work out ok in the end. Also, Greg has serious ex-wife issues, so... yeah. Please drop me a review and brighten a poor author's day. :-) Next up: Mycroft has a plan, Irene has a way into Guantanamo, and Sally and Anthea may have bitten off more than they can chew...


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen.

.

Mycroft's right forefinger twitched against his lips, and his brows drew downward, faint lines appearing above the bridge of his nose. Something had disturbed him. There were voices; a slight shift in the air.

There were two people speaking. He registered the sounds, sifted them, understood their meaning, and immediately cast them aside. They were unimportant. Calmly, he drew a long breath through his nose, and began again.

Mycroft Holmes was thinking.

In his mind, there was a city. Superficially, it was a city rather like London, but within its grey and rain-streaked streets were held memories of Rostov and Krasnodar and Moscow, Stuttgart and Dresden, Istanbul and Ankara, and other places further still.

Within the city, there was a blank space, a compound of cement and iron: frigid, grimy, cruel. Within the compound there was a building, blasted by a Russian winter, half obscured by constant eddying snow.

Within the building, there was a prison cell; and within the cell, there was a man.

Mycroft hesitated a moment outside the door. It was old and heavy, bolted with iron. At eye level was set a small barred window. The light in the cell was dim: yellow and aged. Through the window, Mycroft saw the prisoner for the first time, little more than a hulking silhouette.

" _Dostatochno,_ " he said to the men who accompanied him. " _Vy budete_ z _hdat' zdes'_."

The shorter of the two nodded his assent.

" _Da,_ " he confirmed.

They positioned themselves one on either side of the door, their rifles held loosely across their bodies. Mycroft unbolted the door and stepped inside the cell.

The prisoner sat in an upright chair at a small table. Both were bolted to the floor. Above him, high out of reach, a bare lightbulb hung from a wire.

The prisoner was lean and sallow, swathed in a greatcoat of heavy, dark grey wool. His voice, when he spoke, was an ironic rasp:

"The Kingmaker himself. I'm honoured."

Mycroft smiled thinly.

"Hello Knight."

There were healing scrapes across the man's knuckles and yellowing bruises on his face and neck. The last two fingers of his right hand were strapped together in a crude splint. He had not come quietly then.

Deliberately, Mycroft withdrew the packet of cigarettes from his pocket and tapped two into the palm of his hand. He slid them between his lips and lit them, drawing deep and slow. The hiss of the lighter was loud in the quiet of the cell. Removing one, he reached across the table and slipped the filter end into the corner of Knight's mouth. His fingers brushed the unshaven line of the other man's jaw.

Knight raised his un-splinted hand to the cigarette and exhaled a long trail of smoke that plumed breathily in the frigid air. His hands were cuffed, but chained together only loosely. As he smoked, the splinted hand rested in the crook of his left arm.

"You were foolish to get caught," Mycroft said.

He spoke in English, the words of his mother-tongue curling unfamiliarly in his mouth. Even now, after six years undercover, he spoke with no trace of an accent. Why would he? English, Russian, Polish, Slovak, Serbo-Croat, French, Czech, German, Ukrainian, Basque… he spoke them all, each faultless and unaccented. A man who spoke English with a Russian accent would be a poor spymaster indeed.

Knight shrugged, his narrow shoulders hitched laconically.

"Not foolish; merely unlucky."

Mycroft's eyes narrowed. "If you share what you know, I may yet be able to broker a deal."

The prisoner laughed, but there was no mirth in it.

"There won't be a deal, Kingmaker. Not this time."

In response, Mycroft offered a faint tilt of his head. He gave another smile, the kind that stretched the corners of his mouth while the rest of his face remained impassive. No, there would be no deal. Mycroft couldn't be the man on the white charger riding to the rescue against insurmountable odds. He was not that brazen.

 _What must it feel like,_ Mycroft wondered, _to realise you are expendable?_

He couldn't say what he wanted to say, not with men outside in the corridor and wires in the corners of the cell. He couldn't tell Knight that he was sorry. He could not say "I hope it will be quick", or "You should never have gone against me". He could not say "Do you remember the last night we spent in Lisbon, when the moon was a waning crescent and the orchestra played Chopin?"

But he needed Knight's information, and he needed it quickly.

Of necessity, they spoke in abstractions and ambiguities. Each cryptic statement was a maze of possibilities and traps for the unwary, and Mycroft's mind blazed with it, synapses flying faster than conscious thought. ' _The eyeless man fears not the winter',_ Knight told him, like some strange composite of sage and Shakespearian prophet, his mouth curling in satisfaction at his own wit. ' _East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet'._ His eyes were dark with words unspoken.

And Mycroft revelled, perhaps for the last time, in this effortless and all-consuming connection, this utterly singular thing; this man, the only man – his cocaine-addled younger brother aside – who had ever understood him.

 _'Beware of dragons, Kingmaker. Beware of pirates and of fools'._

He could have stayed there all night, revelling in the use of his mind, but the watch on his wrist chimed once, marking the hour and recalling him to duty. He silenced it ruthlessly.

"Well," he said coldly. "Pleasant as this cryptic little chat has been, I do have a rather more pressing engagement."

He straightened, flicking the cigarette – his fourth – to the floor of the cell. He bowed his head ironically, and stepped toward the door.

"Wait."

Knight had raised himself to his feet, his eyes dark again with something Mycroft could not divine. He stepped boldly into Mycroft's space until they were toe to toe, his head tilted down; and then, with his hands still cuffed awkwardly in front of him, he stooped and pressed a terse kiss against Mycroft's cheek.

Mycroft felt warm breath and hard stubble, smelled wool and skin and home.

He stepped away, clearing his throat.

"You know of course, that tradition holds it to be Judas who did the kissing."

Knight raised an elegant brow, his mouth curling as though Mycroft had said something much wittier than he really had.

"And who's to say that Our Lord did not kiss back?"

Mycroft's mouth was dry, but he managed something close to his usual smirk. "Equating yourself with the Redeemer now, Knight? God help us all."

"Perhaps I just wanted to kiss you."

Mycroft cleared his throat again, pushing past the thin figure and rapping heavily against the door. It was opened at once. Mycroft stepped through into the light of the corridor, but Knight made no move to follow him. He simply stood, in the dim light of the cell, with his head cocked to one side and his hands resting easy in their chains. Even without needing to look back, Mycroft knew that he was smiling.

.

The touch of a hand on his shoulder brought him back to awareness, and Mycroft blinked in the light of a lamp that had not been lit when he closed his eyes. Gregory Lestrade was leaning over his chair, recently showered and dressed in clean nightwear.

"Hey," he murmured. "You ok?"

"Of course. Perfectly."

"Sorry. Just looked like you were kinda lost in your head there for a bit."

Mycroft frowned. "I was thinking."

"What about?"

"I was recalling the last time I saw Theodore Knight. Wondering what I had missed."

Lestrade's head cocked to one side, considering. "So you have a mind palace too then?"

"Something of the sort, yes."

The brown eyes sparked with interest. "What's it like?"

Against all expectation, Mycroft found himself amused.

"Complex," he said, repressively.

Lestrade huffed, his mouth twitching and his eyes affectionate. There was no due cause for affection that Mycroft could see, and the likelihood of its being directed at himself was slim, so presumably something he'd done had reminded the Inspector of Sherlock. He cleared his throat.

"So, Detective Inspector, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?"

Rather to his surprise, Lestrade flushed.

"Ehm… Sharing with you now, actually. If that's ok, that is. You were kind of out of it when I came in."

Mycroft frowned. "You no longer wish to share quarters with Miss Hooper?"

Lestrade flushed even more darkly, rubbing the back of his neck. "Well… it's a bit… awkward."

Mycroft looked up at him, his brow furrowed. Lestrade was newly washed, despite having showered earlier in the day. He was wearing the boxer shorts with the twisted elastic in the waistband rather than the older, more comfortable pair that he seemed to favour, so he'd discarded those after his shower. There were two places on the side of his neck where the skin was faintly reddened, the marks fading now, but still visible.

"I must apologise," Mycroft said slowly. "I had assumed that by this stage of the journey your relationship with Miss Hooper would have progressed to the extent that a degree of intimacy was not undesirable…" He frowned. "Clearly, I was wrong."

Greg stared at him a moment, nonplussed.

"You actually booked us a double room on purpose, didn't you? Oh god, you did. You bloody did."

He collapsed onto the bed that had formerly been Irene's, torn between exasperation, amusement, and flaming embarrassment.

Mycroft didn't deny it.

"I had thought that the opportunity would be not unwelcome."

Greg laughed slightly hysterically.

"You can't just plot out other people's love lives, Mycroft. It's not like planning a coup or overthrowing a state or whatever the hell it is you spend your days doing."

He ran his fingers through his hair and groaned, covering his eyes with a hairy forearm. "People don't just fall in love to order, yeah?"

"I am aware," Mycroft said, stiffly. "I have had occasion before now to find it most vexing, believe me. But I had thought in this case that the necessary regard was already in place. A romantic attachment should have been the natural outcome – your own well-developed protective instincts combined with Miss Hooper's insecurity; the shared anxiety of a common goal; the example of domesticity presented by your friends the Watsons; the increased frequency and duration of physical proximity in recent weeks…"

His expression was so genuinely ruffled that Greg laughed. He put a hand on Mycroft's shoulder and squeezed. Mycroft didn't start, exactly, but stilled, staring up at him in unfeigned surprise. Greg let go quickly.

"Sorry."

"My apologies."

"Thanks for the thought an' all."

"Of course."

"Stellar wing-man. Full marks."

"Don't mention it."

"…Perhaps best not, no."

There was an extended, rather awkward silence.

"…So Miss Hooper is sleeping with Irene then?"

"Thought she'd probably be happier sharing with her than with one of us."

Mycroft arched a brow.

"You thought that she would feel happier in the company of a criminal dominatrix with rather less-than-heterosexual proclivities?"

Greg choked a little on his own tongue.

"Um… Wow. Ok. Did _not_ know that."

The corners of Mycroft's lips twitched. Greg caught his eye, unable to suppress his snort of laughter. To his everlasting amazement, Mycroft joined in.

.

* * *

Thursday morning brought a rather welcome piece of news: Irene had found a way into Guantanamo.

"Tyler Davis," she told them, between mouthfuls of toast and coffee. "Corporal, twenty-six, acting captain of the guard on the north-west gatehouse for the next three weeks. I know what he likes."

Mycroft's grey eyes sparked with the first sign of interest he'd shown since breakfast began.

"And I take it that your new friend is feeling… _talkative?_ "

Irene smirked.

"When he's not tied up, you mean? Oh yes."

.

* * *

Sally Donovan wasn't entirely surprised, when she finally stumbled through the door of her flat after one hell of a day at the office, to find Mycroft Holmes's assistant waiting for her.

"I suppose you're still not going to tell me your name?" she asked, in lieu of many more sensible questions such as 'How the hell did you get in here?' or 'Is that my wine you're drinking?'

The woman smiled and crossed one leg flirtily over the other. "Nice to see you too."

In truth, Sally had half been expecting her. Their carefully orchestrated press release had gone out the night before, and Sally had been kept busy all day fielding vague tip-offs about the possible location of Mycroft Holmes. She didn't expect any of them to yield much. But then, that was hardly the point.

"Will you be staying for dinner?" she asked, turning towards the kitchen. She tossed her keys onto the counter and heaved a pair of shopping bags up beside them.

"Depends on what it is."

"Nothing fancy. It's either burritos or mashed spud with leftover coleslaw. Take your pick."

Anthea's pretty nose wrinkled with distaste. "I think I'll pass, thanks."

Sally shrugged. "Your loss."

She flicked the kettle on out of habit before registering the wine bottle on the counter top and thinking better of it. She had the feeling that this conversation was going to require alcohol.

She poured herself a generous measure (and it _was_ her own wine, dammit, so was shouldn't she/) and turned back to the tedious task of unloading groceries.

"So why are you here?" she asked, shoving open the fridge door with her hip. "News?"

"Bits and pieces, nothing concrete." Anthea was hidden from her view by the wall that divided kitchen from dining room, but Sally could still picture her careless, limpid-eyed shrug. Clearly Sally was going to be giving, not getting, information tonight.

"Tell me something," Anthea said. "Have you heard from Inspector Lestrade at all recently?"

Sally frowned, unloading half a dozen apples from a shopping bag. "No. Why? You can't possibly think he's involved somehow."

"Mm... Perhaps. I was interested to note that his little holiday began less than a week after Mr Holmes disappeared."

"Coincidence. It's got to be. Look, no offence, but Holmes is creepy as fuck. Why would Greg _want_ to help him?"

"An excellent question, Ms. Donovan." The voice was cool, male, and altogether threatening. Sally spun around, apples scattering across the bench and floor.

"Now raise your hands over your head and step out here to join us, if you please."

 _Like Hell she would._

The knives were all in the drawer behind her. No way to get at them without making a noise. Her eyes flew rapidly over the available options. Wine bottles made shitty weapons, the toaster was too unwieldy, and the bag of mushrooms was definitely out. The little cardboard packets of nutmeg and cinnamon, however, had potential. She stuffed them hastily into a pocket and snatched the enamelled rolling pin from the shelf above the microwave as she barrelled through the door.

The rolling pin came down on the meaty shoulder of the closest body and the man buckled with an oath. For a moment she struggled to sort out the confused jumble of images her brain was sending her, but they resolved themselves rapidly into five dark-suited bodies. One was Anthea's, belly-downwards on the ground with a man's weight holding her there and a gun barrel pressing into the soft skin at the back of her neck. The man she'd winged with the rolling pin was already rising, hands outstretched, and there were two others, both women, armed and deadly-looking. The first got a faceful of ground nutmeg and a knee to the groin, but she brought her arm down in a heavy chopping motion that caught Sally in the side of the neck and made her stagger. The man on the floor tackled her around the knees and she hit the ground on pelvis, elbows, and the back of her head. Her teeth clicked together painfully and her brain seemed to jar against the inside of her skull. She swung the arm bearing the rolling pin and heard a satisfying crunch as it found her assailant's nose, but the game was over and Sally knew it. She heard the snick of a cocked firearm and sagged backwards in surrender, her face pressed against the skirting board. She stared at the floor beneath the legs of the dining table, where the dust had gathered since she'd last swept. Her kitchen tiles were broken, she realised, muzzily.

Sally felt the pain throb, white hot, in the recesses of her skull, and realised what was about to happen. _'Oh damn',_ she thought. _'I'm going to pass out.'_ And then she recognised the grey encroaching fuzzily on her field of vision, the spinning lights behind her eyes.

 _'Yup,'_ she thought, _'I was right.'_

 _._

* * *

.

A/N: My apologies for the lengthy delay, oh most-lovely readers! Real life is hard. Hopefully this piece of awkward Mycroft and Sally love will go some way to making up for it. Stay tuned for the next chapter in which the long-anticipated rescue mission will finally be upon us...

Incidentally, the final episode of Season Four has yet to reach we poor suckers in the primitive Antipodes. Please please please don't leave spoilers in the comments. xx


	20. Chapter 20

Chapter Twenty.

.

With a rattle of chain, the guard unlocked the wire gate, releasing the orange-suited prisoners into the compound. Sherlock milled along with them, head-down but not defensive. The other prisoners eyed him, aware that he was an unknown quantity, but unwilling to call attention to it under the eyes of the guards.

The compound was dusty and dry, and there was nothing much to do. Already, Sherlock could feel the back of his neck burning. He turned up the collar of the awful jumpsuit (' _Show off',_ John told him).

Half a dozen of the incarcerated men had struck up a game of basketball. There was a hoop at one end of the compound, and several of the prisoners were clearly very good. Lots of time to practise, he supposed. Aside from the basketball though, activity was desultory at best. Most of the men had broken into little social groups, squatting on their haunches in whatever shade they could find. Sherlock settled himself on the outer edge of a group, near enough to let them know he was listening. Their eyes flickered towards him occasionally, wary, but not overtly hostile. They spoke in a mix of dialects, Pakistani and English, but mostly Arabic. Sherlock listened, and watched.

.

Wrapped in a thin towel, Mary stood before the mirror in the tiny hotel bathroom, her arms braced either side of the sink. On the other side of the door, John was getting their daughter dressed. She could hear his patient voice and Billie's piping replies, the way she heard them every morning at home.

"Would you like the yellow shirt or the stripy one?" John was asking, for the third time that morning.

"Ducks!"

"No, the one with the ducks is in the wash. Would you like the yellow one?"

"Lellow lellow lellow ducks!"

Billie's language skills had increased in leaps and bounds since they'd left England. By the time they got out of here, they'd be taking home a fully-fledged toddler.

If she went home.

If England _was_ home.

Mary looked at her hands, braced against the chipped porcelain. The tendons stood out sharply. Blue veins were visible between the knuckles, more prominent than she remembered against the dull skin. Give it another five years, Mary thought, and she'd have the hands of an old woman. She had a sudden visceral picture of her mother's hands, liver-speckled, swollen-knuckled, with their smooth, pink, perfectly-shaped nails. Her mother would have loved a grandchild.

The woman she had been before she was Mary was forty-one years old now. It wasn't so unusual to be orphaned, by that age.

It hadn't been anything spectacular, in the end. Complications related to diabetes, that was all. For over a dozen years she'd been kept sporadically updated on their little lives. Her mother had played bridge on Friday nights; her father had sold the car. Her mother had overdrawn forty-five dollars at the cash machine down the street; her father took medication for his cholesterol. Little facts, little details. The sorts of things that could be communicated in a short dossier, that could be gleaned by a bored junior agent with half an hour's access to credit card records. She'd been in Belize when word trickled through that her father had died – heart attack, eleven days prior. She'd been in Lebanon when she'd heard about her mum.

 _Mom,_ she thought, in the quiet of her head, trying the long-unfamiliar accent on for size.

If she took Billie back to Illinois, she could be a Mom too.

And that was the crux of it all, wasn't it? It had all seemed so simple when Mycroft had offered his ultimatum. Her family was dead; Illinois had ceased to hold any appeal for her back in the eighties; and she owed nothing to the CIA but twenty-two years of grief and hard living. But still… It was treason that Mycroft wanted from her, plain and simple. Take the talents that the CIA had given her and turn them upon their makers.

She'd never approved of Guantanamo. There was no God-given right to occupy, to detain, to torture at will. Being American didn't change that. That didn't change because you gave yourself a title and called yourself the Leader of the Free World.

But still.

She ran the water in the basin as cold as it would go. She cupped it in her palms and let it trickle out over her swollen eyes. In the bedroom, John and Billie had progressed to socks.

That was what Mycroft was offering in exchange, of course. John, Billie, the life of a middle-class nurse. But would it hold? _John and Billie…_ Billie, who was named for Sherlock. Already, the edges were fraying. Throw Sherlock back into the mix – Sherlock, whom she loved, but whom John loved more – and who knew what might happen. How long could the house of cards last in the face of that? And if it folded, as it must, what would be left for her in England? Barbed coffee mornings with Janine; a sad little affair with someone like David; occasional wet-work for Mycroft-the-bastard?

She still remembered reciting the pledge of allegiance in grade school. Hair in two pigtails, hand over heart.

They didn't do that sort of thing in England. It was too overt, too brash, too open to mockery.

But still, she remembered it.

.

In the end, it took them two days to get everything organised. Two days of increasingly unbearable tension, during which everyone was snappy and short-tempered with everyone else. Mary, Mycroft and Irene spent most of those two days cloistered together, talking out strategies and contingency plans and conducting a little delicate hacking. John tried not to resent it, but it was hard. It wasn't as if Sherlock had ever really explained his thought process, but he'd usually shared it at least. Bits and pieces, scattered thoughts, always with the assumption that John himself should have been able to put it together if only he was clever enough. They'd made a game of it sometimes, Sherlock handing him just enough to let him know which threads to pull. On the rare occasions when John had managed to put something together before he had, Sherlock's eyes had gleamed with pride.

Mycroft's scheming, by contrast, left him feeling as if he'd been weighed and found wanting – dismissed, with nothing of use to contribute until the grownups had made their plans for him. John resented it deeply, but Mary was in no mood to conciliate. Since the evening of their aborted truce she had been both smug and dismissive, her conversation peppered with casual cruelties and snide comments. She seemed on the one hand to be constantly pushing John down, and on the other to be insinuating herself amongst his friends – implying that she knew them better, that she was trusted more, that John himself was an outsider amongst people he'd known for years. It was a tendency he'd noticed in her before, something schoolgirlish and petty that was among her least attractive qualities. He knew that he had hurt her with his revelation regarding Billie's name, but he did not fully understand the reason, nor know how to put it right.

Billie herself was another cause of tension. Mycroft had arranged for Billie and Molly to be met at the airport and taken to safety by a former colleague, one of only three people, he assured them, who had his complete and utter trust. She had been Mycroft's superior when he first joined the Service, but had retired to New Zealand some twenty years ago. John had even met her – a tiny, grey-haired, vigorous old woman called Em who had taken him tramping up Mount Ngaruhoe and beaten him soundly in a sparring match. That had been back when he was still going out with Sarah; back before Moriarty or the Woman, before the roof of St Bart's, before an unseen shot on the highest floor of C.A.M. tower. It seemed a lifetime ago.

As the day of their intended rescue approached, John had been comforted by the thought that Billie, at least, would soon be out of danger. He had reckoned, however, without Mary, who refused to let their daughter out of her sight.

"Don't be more of an idiot than you can help," she'd snapped at him. "He's not trying to keep her safe, he's trying to use her to control me!"

"She's a child! The further away from this mess we can get her, the better."

"Oh yes, because I'm sure _Mycroft Holmes_ has our daughter's best interests at heart! She's his insurance policy, John! He thinks he's got me where he wants me so long as he's got my daughter in his pocket. He doesn't trust me!"

"Frankly, I don't trust you either," John had told her – a comment that had earned him a night on the bedroom floor and yet another morning of chilly silence.

Still, Mycroft and John together might have been able to override Mary had it not been, curiously enough, for Molly. She didn't want to leave.

"I care about Sherlock too," she'd told them, chin thrust outwards defiantly. "I want to help. I was ok with just being the babysitter when I thought you needed me, but I'm not going to take her away from her mum if Mary doesn't want me to."

In the face of Mary and Molly's combined determination, Mycroft had given in, though it didn't prevent him from getting the last word.

"Frankly, Ms. Agnew, if you want to risk your daughter's life, that's your own affair," he'd said, sneering down his aristocratic nose. "Though it might behove you to consider the effect of any possible repercussions as regards your marriage."

John, needless to say, was not happy.

.

John slept poorly the night before their intended rescue mission, his dreams tangled and vague. James Sholto appeared with his arm blown off, something that had never happened in life. In the dream, James was cursing at him, his eyes flashing, blood flying from the sleeve of his fatigues as he gestured. The sleeve had been carefully folded and pinned back above the elbow, but nobody had thought to staunch the blood flow. James had raised his remaining arm and pointed, and John had seen in the distance a long dusty line of armoured vehicles creeping over the hill. And then a shot had flowered in the middle of James's chest, and he had slumped earthwards with a soft sigh. And John, turning, had seen that it was Mary who held the gun.

"I did it for you, John," she told him. "Moriarty had snipers watching. They would have killed you if I hadn't done it."

Her voice was rich and deep, and when she stooped to kiss him, she was tall and thin and unyielding, with enormous, pale hands.

He woke disquieted, and the memory of those large hands followed him as he dressed. In the dream, the hands had been cool and assured, without a trace of the unpractised awkwardness he suspected they'd exhibit in real life. _Bluffing_ , he thought with a sense of satisfaction, before reminding himself that it hadn't been real, and that the ulterior motives he was so pleased to have seen through belonged to his own subconscious.

He frowned as he pulled a shirt over his head, his battered ribs twinging.

The thing was, he and Sherlock had never been like that. He knew what people saw in them, and he knew they weren't wrong. He knew it was there. But it was just a potential, an amorphous something that neither of them had ever pursued. He didn't consider that this made them different from any other pair of friends. Sex, and sexual attraction, were intrinsic components of adulthood – and sexual interest sparked, to a greater or lesser extent, between most of the people he knew. The same potential that existed between him and Sherlock existed, in some form or other, between Sherlock and Irene, Irene and Mycroft, Molly and Greg, Greg and Sally, Mycroft and Mary, Mary and Irene – even, in a strange way, between Mary and Sherlock. Every adult friendship he'd ever observed was full of those little sparks – those moments of shared laughter, of flirtatiousness and innuendo, of eye contact held a moment too long. People made those connections every day and chose, just as deliberately, not to act on them. He didn't understand why the pull that existed between him and Sherlock should be considered any different.

He'd had dreams about kissing friends before now. Molly, once, after a day she'd spent flirting with Sherlock even harder than usual. Sally had appeared a couple of times, usually on days when she'd been particularly irritating. It wasn't as though Sherlock was any different.

Still, he thought, as he pulled a bulletproof vest on over his shirt, it wasn't exactly an auspicious start to the day.

.

All in all, it was a sorry bunch of rescuers who assembled late that afternoon to receive their final instructions. The dislike that had simmered for months between Mary and Mycroft had progressed, in the past few days, to a fiercely watchful mistrust. John was hard pressed to remember a time he had ever been so furious with his wife, a fact that in no way prevented him from being almost equally furious with Molly. Molly and Greg, for some reason incomprehensible to the rest of the group, were avoiding one another like the plague. Irene, by some near-psychic facility, had divined the most embarrassing portion of John's dream, and had responded with appropriate maturity by treating him to a constant homoerotic badinage. Needling him about Sherlock was, curiously, the only thing she had even slightly in common with Mary, the two of them having saved time and stolen a march on everybody else by simply loathing one another on sight.

By the time they clambered into the recently-acquired van late that afternoon, hardly anyone was speaking to anyone else.

The drive was undertaken in tense silence. John was at the wheel with Irene riding shotgun, while the rest of the team maintained a stony distance. The only effort at communication, in fact, came from Billie, who was grizzling incessantly over the combination of a mild heat rash and a mislaid toy rabbit. John found it difficult to wrap his head around the fact that he was driving a stolen, shoddily-armoured vehicle containing his infant daughter _towards_ a secure facility infamous for the most brutal interrogation techniques in the world, but clearly that was just his life. As the van barrelled recklessly through potholes, he seriously contemplated the prospect of just walking away. He could take Billie and get the hell out of there, leave Irene and Mycroft to their absurdities and intrigues, leave bloody, back-stabbing, not-her-real-name Mary to the life of violence that she obviously missed.

He thought of Sherlock's upturned coat collar and his coffee-with-two-sugars. He thought of a handshake on an airport runway and a postcard from Copenhagen. He kept driving.

.

"Ok," John said, puffing out a long breath. "This is it."

He pulled off the road into a sheltered grove three miles north of the camp. A borrowed army truck sat waiting for them beneath the scrubby trees. They piled out of the van and, in silence, began transferring their equipment from one vehicle to the other.

John passed the van keys into Molly's hand.

"It'll be ok," she told him, bouncing Billie gently on her hip. "We'll see you soon."

"Yeah, I know."

He let out another long breath, then stooped and pressed a rough kiss against Billie's cheek. She kissed him back, slobbery and uncoordinated.

"Dada."

"Yeah, I love you too baby."

He kissed Molly as well. "Thanks Mol."

"Any time."

"No really." He swallowed. "Look, if things go wrong…"

"They won't."

"If they do. If we… My parents would take her, ok? I'm not asking you to do it all alone."

"I know."

"And my sister's got money. She'll help."

"I know, John."

"Ok."

"It'll be alright. Go on." She smiled tremulously and squeezed his arm. "Bring him back safe."

Throat too tight for speech, John nodded.

Mary kissed Billie and wrapped Molly in a brief hug. Greg kissed them both, a hand on each of their heads. Irene and Mycroft nodded their goodbyes. One by one, they climbed into the battered lorry. John started the engine and released the handbrake. As they pulled away, Molly had a last glimpse of his set face and blue, ice-chip eyes. Then the lorry was behind the trees, around the corner of the road and gone, with only a thin dust-cloud to show that it had been there at all.

And then there was only Molly left; alone in a foreign country, in possession of an armoured van and a fifteen-month-old child.

" _The things we do for your Uncle Sherlock…"_ she murmured.

.

* * *

.

A/N: Sorry about the huge delay in updates... All I can say is that S4 seeeeeriously messed things up. It's taken me this long to recover from it. Much love to anybody who's still reading. :-)


	21. Chapter 21

Chapter Twenty-One.

.

The heavy boot bore down, grinding chips of glass and gravel into the back of his neck. Sherlock pressed his face closer to the floor of the cell, hoping to escape the pressure but, as the boot carried the weight of a thirty-stone corporal, it was a futile endeavour. He had long-since ceased thrashing, but even so, his arm was wrenched behind his back by meaty hands and held there as the jumpsuit was stripped forcibly from his shoulders. The meaty hands twisted at the skin of his wrist before they released it, a bit of pettiness that irritated him far more than it should have, under the circumstances. The fact that it stung like all hell in no way made up for the fact that it was a tactic more commonly found in the arsenal of eight-year-old schoolgirls.

It was only when the jumpsuit was tugged lower that Sherlock began to be seriously concerned. Men whistled and stamped their feet as his lower body was revealed, and he shuddered as a dozen hands pawed crudely at his exposed buttocks. One particularly fat and sweaty pair lingered overlong on either side of his arse crack, and he mentally singled out their owner for an exceptionally violent death.

The first blast of water from the cold hose came as more of a relief than he would have liked to admit. The soldiers that surrounded him sprang back with shouts of laughter, and the boot, mercifully, was removed from his neck. The force of the hose was considerable, and Sherlock winced as he felt the water insinuating itself into places where cold water was never intended to go. A fresh round of catcalls greeted his obvious discomfort, but on the whole, Sherlock was relieved. This was just the regular hazing meted out to newly-transferred prisoners; a friendly greeting from the folks in Camp X.

So far, his cover was intact.

.

The battered truck, emblazoned with the letters U.S. ARMY, crawled to a dawdling stop at the northwest entrance to Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre. Strictly speaking, the road was closed to traffic, the facility off-limits to the local populace, just as the Cuban countryside was off-limits to military personnel. In practice, however, the gate was conduit to a thin but steady trickle of commerce. It wasn't much. A bottle; a handful of dollars; contraband music or pornography. Men left through it, seeking women softer and more sensual than those provided by the American army. Packages entered by it; cigars and opium and Cuban cocaine.

Responsibility for the gate's security fell to Tyler Davis, an Acting Corporal of twenty-six, with nine years of near-blameless service to his record. On this particular evening, Corporal Davis was entertaining his new girlfriend in the northwest gatehouse, trying and failing to comprehend his own luck. Gate duty itself had fallen to Private Kenny Mitchell Junior, a pimply eighteen-year-old from Brooklyn City. The rest of their squad were absent, their evening's duty being occupied by the search for a broken circuit in the boundary fence.

Corporal Davis being otherwise occupied, it was to Private Mitchell that the duty of vehicle inspection fell. The driver's side window rolled down as he approached, revealing a slight, blue-eyed man in khaki fatigues, with a rumpled face and greying, military-cut hair. There were half a dozen others in the truck with him, but Private Mitchell had spent long enough on the northwest gate to know better than to question it.

The driver of the truck presented a swipe card that identified him as Captain Tobias March, M.D. He waited patiently while Private Mitchell ran the card through a handheld reader. The credentials checked out. He saluted, opened the gate, and stepped smartly aside.

"Ta, chum," said the driver.

Private Mitchell frowned. The accent was unfamiliar, and it took him a moment to place it.

"You English?" he asked, confusion colouring his tone.

The small, cuddly-looking officer smiled, and extended an arm containing a semi-automatic pistol out of the window.

"Are you English, _Sir?_ " he corrected, pleasantly – and clobbered him.

.

"Really, John," Irene huffed. "Did you have to hit him so hard?"

"He pulled back at the last minute. Smacked himself right into it."

"So what do we do with him now?" Greg asked. "Bit noticeable, innit?"

"Put him in here with mine," Irene said, motioning to the open door of the gatehouse.

Greg took the Private under the arms while John grabbed his legs. Puffing and swearing, they manoeuvred him though the doorway and dumped him on the floor. Greg snorted.

"Nice," he said. "Artistic."

Irene's erstwhile boyfriend lay naked and unconscious across a largeish desk. Each wrist was secured to one of the table legs with a pair of padded handcuffs, and there were pink lashes across his pale backside. Across his shoulders, in lipstick, the words _'Give it to me good'_ were scrawled in curly handwriting.

Irene smirked. "I thought so."

Greg had imagined that getting the young Private out of his uniform would be difficult, but he had reckoned without Irene's clear expertise. Within five minutes she had stripped him, given him a top-up shot of something that she assured them would keep him out for a couple of hours, and positioned him carefully in a chair. When she toppled him forward, his nose came to rest gently in between his colleague's buttocks. John snorted with laughter.

"It's a beautiful picture 'n' all, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to pull rank. Can't let the kid suffocate."

He repositioned the Private so that his face was tilted sideways, airway open, and held snugly in position by his comrade's thighs.

"Ah, look at 'em," Greg said. "Cheek to cheek, so to speak."

John snorted.

"Alright, come on, we need to get out of here. You're enjoying this way too much."

"Just thinking about what I could accomplish if I get Dimmock drunk enough at the Christmas Party."

"Didn't know you swung that way."

"Oi!"

"Just sayin'… Also, getting your workmates drunk so you can handcuff them naked to a table is the sort of thing that goes down badly with Chief Commissioners."

"Alright, not Dimmock. Sherlock."

"Mate, I'd drug him and deliver him myself."

.

John checked his gun for the dozenth time in as many minutes and eased his way around the corner of the external staircase and onto the third-floor landing. Irene touched a hand to the small of his back and nodded. Praying that it would work, John drew the stolen swipe card from his pocket and pressed it against the sensor. An LED winked green.

There was no reason it shouldn't have worked, of course. The swipe cards had been stolen by Irene and doctored by Mary, who had hacked the CIA mainframe to upgrade their status to access-all-areas. Even if the tampering were discovered, it was a dozen miscellaneous soldiers who would bear the brunt, and Mycroft was confident that there was no way it could be traced back to Mary. Still, John wasn't comfortable. The hacking of high-level security agencies was not his area, and he distrusted any tool whose fitness for the job he couldn't be certain of on sight.

The break-in itself had been relatively straightforward. In John's experience, they usually were. ( _Human Error_ , Sherlock's voice whispered in the back of his mind).

John leaned against the door handle and felt it yield to his touch. "Keep your hands off your gun unless you plan on using it," he grunted to Irene. She didn't dignify it with a response.

"Northwest entrance secured," she murmured into her headset. "We're going in. Tailor, over and out."

.

The codenames had been Irene's idea of a joke.

"We're doing _Tinker Tailor,_ " she'd informed them all, a glimmer in her eyes. "Order of seniority. Mycroft's 'Tinker', I'm 'Tailor' –"

"I don't much like that," John had interjected. "Wasn't Tailor the spy?"

"Ah, you just spoiled the movie for me!"

Mycroft snorted. "The _novel_ to which you refer, Gregory, was a highly fictionalised account of an incident that occurred during the first War. The spy in question was in fact named Douglas. It was not a _movie._ "

"No, there was definitely a movie…"

"Tinker dear, _do_ pipe down," Irene said sweetly. Mycroft pursed his mouth in distaste.

"I'm Tailor," Irene reiterated, "Mrs Watson is 'Soldier'; John's 'Sailor' –"

John scowled. Trust Irene never to pass up a gay joke at his expense.

"Inspector Lestrade is 'Richman' –"

Greg snorted. "In what universe?"

"Molly is 'Poorman'; Sherlock is 'Beggarman' –"

"As in, 'he's a stupid bloody beggar'?"

"And Knight, should we chance to find him, is 'Thief'," Mycroft rounded off. "Your wit, as ever, is scintillating."

.

And now here they were. And John, much to his displeasure, was stuck with Irene Adler as a partner-in-crime. Mycroft's reasoning, typically enough, had been unflattering:

"Each team requires at least one person who can think and at least one who can hold a gun," he had drawled, looking down his beaky nose at them. Greg, who by Mycroft's estimation apparently fitted neither category, was with Mary. Mycroft, humble as only a Holmes could be, was a team all on his own.

John shouldered the door open softly and slid in through the gap, mindful of the silhouette he presented against the evening sky. He felt Irene slip through behind him and heard the snick of the door, but he had no attention to spare for either. An armed guard stood a dozen feet away, already turning in their direction, head tilted enquiringly. The momentary impulse to seek clarification was his undoing. John drew and fired with simple economy of movement, and the dart took him in the shoulder. The soldier brought his weapon to bear, but John was on him before he could fire it, and a solid blow to the crook of the man's elbow sent the rifle crashing to the ground. John pulled back, readying a second blow, but he scarcely needed it. The man sank to his knees, shaking his head and blinking, before keeling over backwards completely as the tranquiliser did its job. John caught him under the armpits before he hit the ground, and lowered him softly down.

"Why, Captain Watson... I had no idea you were so _forceful._ "

John grunted. "I'm going to take that as _'nice job'_."

Irene shot him a flirty smile. "Well, it was."

"Cheers. Pity about the racket. Stupid kid. Who tries to use a rifle in a three-foot corridor?"

Irene shrugged.

"What, no comments about letting me use my rifle in _your_ corridor any day?"

"Oh, I think you should save that weapon for Sherlock, don't you?"

John groaned. "You know, you'd gone at least twenty minutes without mentioning how much you'd like to see me giving it to my posh-boy flatmate."

Irene smirked.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing…. Just – ' _Posh-Boy'?_ "

.

Though he scarcely needed the confirmation, Mycroft glanced at his watch. 7.39pm. The lack of any kind of alarm was reassuring. It suggested that both of his teams had been able to enter the facility without challenge.

With a keen, sweeping glance around the darkened corridor, Mycroft withdrew the swipe card from his pocket and let himself through an unmarked door into a stairwell. Unless he was much mistaken, the most high-risk prisoners were housed on the floor below.

Time to find his brother.

.

The corridor they'd entered by opened out into a long gallery that ran, mezzanine-style, around the perimeter of the floor below. Greg crouched in a thin shadow, trying to breathe as quietly as possible. Four feet away from him, Mary Watson was inserting a new sheaf of darts into her sniper rifle. Unhurriedly, she raised the weapon to her shoulder and swung it in a slow arc. It was so controlled that it took Greg a moment to realise that she was firing, scarcely impeded by the kickback, scarcely needing to aim. Guards dropped like skittles in her wake, the closest first. By the time the third man noticed, he was already dropping, the dart slipping in at the base of his neck. By the time the last in line managed to turn and face them, six of his colleagues lay slumped and twitching on the ground. There was no expression on Mary's face. She flicked the safety on and rose smoothly, eyes already scanning ahead. With a flick of her chin, she indicated that Greg should follow her. He staggered to his feet, feeling like a sixty-year-old.

So, this was Mary Watson. This was the woman John was married to.

"Under the stairs," she told him curtly, indicating the slumped figures.

There was a stairwell running down to join the gallery from the floor above. It was functional rather than aesthetic, just horizontal slabs of concrete bolted onto steel. It wasn't cover in the strictest sense. Anyone on the staircase would only have to look down between their feet to see the bodies beneath the stairs. But they didn't have time to find a better hiding place, not with who-knew-how-many more soldiers between them and the fifth-floor cell block. ' _Do try to clean up after yourselves,'_ Mycroft had said. ' _But don't dawdle over it, if you please. We haven't the time.'_

That was the only reason they were shooting darts instead of bullets. Apparently, blood drew more attention.

 _'And we couldn't have that, could we?'_ Greg thought savagely, hefting the first body over his shoulder. The soldier was heavy with gym-sculpted muscle. Laying him down as gently as he could in the cramped space beneath the stairs, Greg caught sight of his face: round and babyish, with acne peeping from beneath his hairline. Still a bloody kid.

The second soldier was smaller and slighter, ginger-haired, with pale, freckled skin. The third had the body of a young athlete; the fourth reeked of the same brand of deodorant that his fifteen-year-old nephew favoured. The fifth was a woman, heavyset, but with hair that reminded him of Sally's.

 _'No blood, if you please'_ Mycroft's voice drawled inside his head _. 'I should hate to draw attention.'_

.

It had taken him longer to find the high-security cells than he had anticipated. Mycroft felt a bead of sweat trickle from his hairline. They were not going to go unnoticed forever.

But this was the right place; it had to be. The lowest level, the deepest pit. Fluorescent bars blazed overhead, buzzing with electricity. The light bounced off the white floor, the whiter walls. Nothing could go unnoticed here, nothing unmarked.

It wasn't like the prisons he remembered from his time in the field. It wasn't foetid and sweltering like the jail in Kosovo where he'd once been confined, nor narrow and filthy like the dungeon he'd rescued Sherlock from in Serbia. It wasn't dark and frigid like the cell in Krasnodar where his agent had kissed him on the cheek and walked calmly to his fate. It wasn't like the stone-walled courtyard in Berlin where his brother had died.

No, the Americans liked their prisons clean.

To Mycroft's eyes though, the very walls told stories. A scrape against the tile here, where they had dragged a prisoner who fought and screamed. A rusty stain over there on the skirting board, where the blood had splashed when a boot was driven downwards onto a bare, unprotected arm. There were long black hairs on the white tiles, some broken, some torn out by the root. There were chips in the steel doorframe nearest him, chips made by broken or breaking teeth. There were smudged lines of ink low on the white-tiled wall, the kind left when the wet pages of a book were torn and scattered. Easily missed by a cleaner, considered irrelevant by prisoner or guard. Impossible, now, to tell what the printed words had said. Impossible to tell whether the characters were English or Arabic or Chinese, whether from a holy book, a novel, or merely cheap pornography.

A chain swung from the ceiling of the nearest cell. He knew at a glance that his fingertips would catch on the lowest link if he stood beneath it with arms raised. But then, Mycroft was taller than most men.

There were four soldiers in the corridor. Four soldiers, standing guard over a single occupied cell. Whoever they were keeping in there was a very valuable prisoner indeed. He drew a deep breath. _Please, God, let it not be like Serbia._

If they'd tortured his baby brother… If they'd so much as damaged a hair of Sherlock's idiotic head… There would be a reckoning.

Four soldiers between him and his brother.

He almost felt sorry for them.

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* * *

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 **A.N.** Thanks so much for your continued comments. xx


	22. Chapter 22

Chapter Twenty-Two.

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He'd turned off the lights in the hallway.

How strange.

Sherlock stepped through the door onto the landing, his hand searching the wall for a light switch that somehow wasn't there.

He blinked, trying to force his eyes to adjust, but the corridors of his mind palace remained dark. It wasn't a normal sort of darkness – not the everyday sort that came and went with the progress of the sun, but an inky darkness, thick as tar and twice as suffocating. No light filtered through from the street outside – not the yellow of the streetlights with their outdated incandescent bulbs, not the blue, pin-prick lights of phone screens, nor the twinned red and white of passing cars. There was no gold outline around the edge of Mrs Hudson's door, and no starlight filtered through from the empty flat behind him.

He reached out, groping blindly for the banister, and his hands grasped and closed on nothing. He reached behind him and found the edge of the doorframe, felt the fluted wood and old varnish, the deep scar in the joinery that was the relic of an enraged ophthalmologist with a hatchet.

Blindly, he slid his hand across the wall, away from the door, until he found the corner of the landing. With his right hand pressed against it, he moved forward, edging his right foot forward until his toes slid over an unseen edge and he felt cool air on the ball of his foot. Oh-so-carefully, he lowered it, until his bare toes touched the step below.

One down. Sixteen to go.

He was aware, in the back of his mind that he was… _in_ the back of his mind. If this had been real, he would have walked the staircase easily, blinded or no. Muscle memory, acute and _accurate_ perception or his surroundings… he could have skipped down, could have hopped on one leg, could have strolled, perfectly balanced, down the bannister rail. But this wasn't real; this was his mind, and he'd never had a more dangerous enemy.

A second step, painfully tentative, nothingness where he expected his footing to be.

A third step, and a fourth, each as painful as the last. He swayed, scrabbling at the wallpaper for balance.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

And then he heard it: - the first sound to break the silence of his mind; a far-off, jaunty whistling.

Footsteps, a quick one-two patter jogging up the steps to the front door. _John's footsteps_. Keys being lifted in a rapid, musical jangle towards the lock. _John's keys_. Hands turning the doorknob, a light shove against the door. _John's hands._

And the light streamed in.

* * *

John breathed light and fast, trying not to make a sound. His heart was beating a rapid tempo, his breath quick with exertion. In his arms, the soldier's body was slackening, but he didn't release his hold.

The darts worked fast, but not fast enough. It was too _noisy._

The second man he'd hit had taken upwards of three minutes to go down. Three minutes was too long. Time enough to shoot back, to call for back-up, or just to make one hell of a racket. John was no sniper. He couldn't take out a dozen a minute the way Mary could. His weapon of choice was a pistol, good for close-quarters, easy to conceal, but not so accurate over distance. He needed time to approach, to line up each shot; and besides, the corridor hardly lent itself to the broad view needed to take out a dozen at a time. No; the only option that John could see was to get in close enough to keep them quiet as they went down.

It was an approach not without its risks, he thought, as the soldier he currently had in a choke hold flailed a weak fist in the direction of his groin. He twitched his hips out of the way and renewed the pressure on the man's windpipe. Saliva dribbled from the soldier's mouth and spattered John's shirt-sleeve. He sighed. Why was it never Sherlock who got slobbered on?

Finally, the soldier went lax. John waited a moment or two, just to prevent any effort at last-ditch heroism, and then slid the man quietly down to the floor. Behind him, Irene was methodically removing the clip from each of the soldier's weapons.

John stretched, feeling his back click. His shoulders whined with the effort. Why, he wondered, did Americans all have to be so bloody _heavy_? Give him a scrawny little Islington drug addict any day.

This corridor really was poorly provided with places to stash bodies, John mused, as he tugged the comatose Private into the scant cover provided by the lee of a doorway. It was almost as if whoever designed it had known…

"Richman reporting," Greg's voice whispered through his earpiece. "Fifth floor cells all check out. No sign of Beggarman."

John waited, poised, still breathing hard, for Mycroft's reply. Only silence answered them. After several moments, Irene activated her own mic.

"Understood. Proceed to fourth-floor south."

"Copy. Over and out."

John straightened, exchanging a glance with Irene. He hoped very much that Mycroft was simply too busy to hang around and chat.

* * *

Mary crept noiselessly from the shadow of the stairwell, trying to ignore the shuffling footfalls and harsh breathing that represented Greg's best attempt at stealth. She'd cleared the fifth floor of hostiles with almost laughable ease. Clearly whoever was running the facility these days had got more than a little complacent. She twisted her lip between her teeth absent-mindedly, half-daydreaming about offering them her services. If she had charge of a place like this, a cowboy like Sherlock Holmes would never have got within twenty miles of it. Still, that was what the CIA got for failing to trust their best people.

 _Not that they were entirely wrong, on that score._

With a steady hand, she raised her rifle to her shoulder and took aim.

* * *

Sherlock came to in a rush, feeling the harsh light of the cell even through his closed eyes. For a moment, his dream pursued him, the afterimage of John flickering in front of his eyelids, silhouetted against a blazing light.

Rapidly, he catalogued the information available to him. He was lying face-down on a smooth cement floor, bruised and soaking, but more-or-less unharmed. Harsh light beat against his eyelids, dampness and humidity filled the air, and there was empty space around him. He lay still, listening for the telltale buzz of electronics or anything else that might indicate he was being observed. There was a slight crackle and hiss on the edge of hearing, but it was only the hiss usually attributable to fluorescent lights of a certain age. There was nothing piggybacking onto it, so far as he could tell. He could hear no organic sounds of any kind – no breath, no footsteps, no rustle of clothing. Unobserved then. _Good._

He allowed his eyelids to flicker slightly in a way that might have indicated merely a very active dream. The split-second glance confirmed his previous hypothesis. He was alone in the cell.

The orange jumpsuit still hung loose about his waist, but they hadn't completely stripped him, nor removed his underwear. _My lucky day,_ he thought, wiggling a hand beneath him and giving himself a quick and not entirely gratuitous grope. The garrotte wire was secure in the waistband of his pants, as was the modified lock pick in his fly. _Good._

With one lithe movement, Sherlock sprang to his feet. He danced a few steps in pleased anticipation.

It was time to get out of this cell.

* * *

The steel door to the prison cell had no window. There was an iron bar across it, padlocked with a single heavy chain. No swipe-card access here, Mycroft noted. Some things, it seemed needed to be done the old-fashioned way.

The lock was complex, and none of the guards were carrying the key. That privilege, no doubt, resided with their commanding officer. It took him longer than it should have done to pick the lock, and by the time the last tumbler fell into place, the sweat was standing out on his brow. Despite a certain aptitude, he had never been lying when he claimed that fieldwork was not his natural milieu.

With a snick that was loud in the silence, the lock sprang open. Mycroft drew himself to his full height and took a moment to compose himself. _Please, God, let it not be like Serbia._

The door swung open at his touch. A figure sat in the very centre of the cell, a deck of weathered playing cards spread across the table in front of him.

"Hello Mycroft," he said. "You took your sweet time."

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 **A/N:** I owe you all a giant apology for how long I've made you wait - and for the various cliff hangers. I'm afraid it's not going to get better any time soon. Being an adult sucks. Love and grateful thanks to anybody who's still reading. I can't promise when you'll get the next update, but I _have_ discovered that reviews make excellent prompts...

'Till next time.

-Ev.


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